Manifiesto del murmullo
An exhibition by Ana Gallardo12.SEPT.2026 — 19.DIC.2026
In praise of the murmur
Virginia Roy
I. The emergence of the plot
Carmen Gómez Raba painted still lifes, a genre deemed minor within the hierarchies of art history. In 1950s Spain, she managed to have her works shown in a few exhibitions and received some critical attention in the press. She died young. Ana Gallardo, her daughter, also an artist, recovered her paintings, analysed them, copied them and cleaned them with saliva. She created small embroideries using those images; she commissioned her daughter to produce those same still lifes in ceramic. She wanted to explore the mediality that allowed her to expand the possibilities of formats, objects and spaces. Within those cracks, she sought to restore her mother’s void, the wound of her absence. To delve into the vessels, into their stories. Bowls, as Ursula K. Le Guin suggests, can be regarded as the first cultural artefacts: containers or bags for collecting and carrying objects, as well as for keeping words and experiences. A vessel for life, yet also a place for storytelling. Le Guin writes: “my carrier bag … full of beginnings without ends, of initiations, of losses, of transformations and translations, and far more tricks than conflicts, far fewer triumphs than snares and delusions.”1
In Manifiesto del murmullo [Murmur Manifesto], Gallardo revisits the images from her mother’s press cuttings, enlarges them into large-format prints and uses them to cover the walls of the exhibition space. Through this gesture, she enters into a play of scales through which to hold her body and her pain. Rescaling sizes and affects. Stories, too. And in that enlargement of the image, the pixel explodes, bursts. Another narrative emerges.
It is often thought that digital zooming —the magnification of a photograph— represents an objective and scientific approach. Just as with a telephoto lens, the aim is to capture that which is minute and imperceptible to the naked eye, challenging human logic through technology to reveal that which exists but remains hidden. Yet Gallardo did not anticipate that the pixelation would become steganographic, nor that the bits would be altered. In fact, what happened was that, when the data was entered to process the enlargement, the steganographic application failed to recognise the information and replaced it with something else. The image had rebelled and reinvented itself, filling its gaps with fiction. What emerged was an unexpected cascade of abstractions of colour and organic forms that bore little resemblance to the original image. Suddenly, the plot took shape and formed a network of its own. In the artist’s words, a new calligraphy of resistance sprang forth. Gallardo painted these amorphous, chromatic outlines that had emerged in oil, creating medium-sized and large-format paintings. She once again expanded the possibilities of the image. Of textures. She unleashed materiality to explore its transition onto the canvas and into new embroideries. Into another temporality, into other bodies. Once more, scales, the inquiry into those cracks. Time travelling through matter, through memory. Through size.
The outcome of this work is a series of abstract forms that neither speak nor represent themselves, but rather refer to that hidden, distorted code. It is not about a modern painting that demands its autonomy, but rather the embodiment of an encrypted message. Like a trap, the pixels have been transformed into fishing nets in which you become ensnared.
In her earlier works, Gallardo had worked with black graphite. Her large-scale drawings featured endless layers of charcoal, creating a dense, monochrome black surface. The immensity of that darkness allowed the artist to open up a space of possibility, a place of poetic and political imagination, where the absence of the image facilitated the depth of its projection. Image as a source of power was rejected. On the contrary, in these works, the silhouettes cling to the literal nature of the lines, to the deliberate and persistent refusal to represent, and to their intention to remain concealed. In this new series, space condenses and flattens, becoming squashed. The layers overlap and emphasise the textuality. Layers of oblivion, of matter, of false truths emerge. Superimpositions of forgotten, distorted, enlarged and misrepresented bodies. The resulting marks, in earth-brown hues, are unrecognisable and operate according to unidentifiable codes. They simulate reflections of water lilies, perhaps even skin pigments. Or all of the above. In this way, the surface functions as a mask for a distorted and deceptive narrative, which becomes an instrument for deception.
II. Noise and murmurs from the margin
We live in a society of transparency, as Byung-Chul Han summarises in his book by the same name.2 We live in a state of constant exposure, where hypervisibility has become a strategy both for communication and for control. We know (and others know) what we are up to at all times; we show it and share it, among ourselves and with others. Being seen is what matters. We are subject to total and constant scrutiny, which facilitates monitoring and, consequently, surveillance. Han asserts: “The demand for transparency grows loud precisely when trust no longer prevails. In a society based on trust, no intrusive demand for transparency would surface. The society of transparency is a society of mistrust and suspicion; it relies on control because of vanishing confidence.”3
Gallardo’s works are embedded in these reflections. They reject pristine clarity and embrace ambiguity and camouflage. They promote concealment and champion the defence of mystery. As Gallardo remarks: “Secrecy becomes an act of survival, and subtlety, the most radical form of dissent.”4 This concealment reveals that all that remains is noise, a rumour. A murmuring frame. A murmur that is perceived as a soft sound in which the words remain unintelligible. An involuntary murmur, functioning as ambient sound, somewhat indistinct. A murmur as background noise, unarticulated, distinct from a whisper wherein there is intent.
Noise has historically and socially been regarded as disorderly, annoying, unintelligible and, therefore, devoid of political value and legitimacy. Judith Butler analyses the political dimension of noise, understood as a loophole and a margin of resistance to the established order. 5 Noise lies outside communicative codes and emerges as a performative device that gives presence to bodies that are neither recognised nor accepted. Thus, noise constitutes a space for political protest, a disruptive element that challenges power structures. It embraces the limitation of the uncommunicable within a system that regulates what makes sense and what is excluded. Butler states: “subversive noise… betokens demands for cultural autonomy” [...] as “the sounds of the body exceed the form of vocalization [...] the body erupts, the body interrupts.”6
Gallardo embraces that noise between the lines, that unnoticed murmur that falters and lingers on the margin. Within that distance and remoteness that allows for critical reflection and the existence of desire, as Han points out. The obsession with transparency annihilates desire, seduction, imagination and the critical distance necessary for deep reflection. “Pleasure on display, in an exhibition, is not pleasure at all.”7
The artist positions herself within this underlying quest, within that persistent undercurrent. Ultimately, the murmur to which Gallardo appeals is a veiled cry that yearns to seep into the margins. Her works pay tribute to what lies hidden: “the right to obscurity, to concealment and to the eloquence of silent things.”8 Amidst this contemporary clamour, Gallardo’s stance is that of a camouflager, a concealer. To vanish from public space and representation, and to lose oneself in the murmur.
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1. Ursula K. Le Guin, “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction,” in Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places (New York: Grove Press, 1989), p. 169.
In this book, Le Guin argues that the first cultural artefact was a vessel rather than a spear or a pointed object, in contrast to the traditional narrative of the hunter-hero.
2. Byung-Chul Han, The Transparency Society, trans. Erik Butler (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015)
3. Byung-Chul Han, op. cit., p.48.
4. Ana Gallardo, in conversation, 2026.
5. Judith Butler, “Sin aliento: riendo, llorando al límite del cuerpo” [“Out of Breath: Laughing, Crying at the Body’s Limit”], keynote lecture delivered at Sala Nezahualcóyotl, Centro Cultural Universitario, UNAM, June 13, 2019. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CKjVn_A2VPs.
6. Judith Butler, op. cit.,
“Subversive noise … betokens demands for cultural autonomy” is a direct quotation from Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), p. 7.
7. Byung-Chul Han, op. cit., p.12.
8. Ana Gallardo, in conversation, 2026.
Pixelated Memory
Eugenio Viola
In Ana Gallardo’s work, what is personal has never remained private: individual experience enables questioning broader social structures. Her poetics address what our societies prefer to keep out of the picture: ageing bodies, women rendered invisible, precariousness, loss, and the labour that sustains life without receiving recognition. Gallardo explores lives marked by gender-based violence, the passing of time and exclusion. Violence is not presented as a fixed condition, but as an experience capable of being transformed into care, transmission and resistance.
In Manifiesto del murmullo [Murmur Manifesto], I recognise the central themes of that research —personal and collective memory, feminism, violence and maternal heritage— but there is also a shift towards an even more intimate realm: that of her mother and the incomplete ways in which we reconstruct those who are no longer with us. The project suggests that secrecy can be a form of survival and that subtlety, far from equating to docility, can constitute a form of dissidence. Whispering does not equate to remaining silent. Rather, it is a way of spreading knowledge without revealing it entirely, whilst protecting it from views that categorise, capture or neutralise it. Within this economy of the barely perceptible, fragility ceases to be a deficiency and becomes a method.
The point of departure is a still life painted by Gallardo’s mother, which has been preserved as a photograph published by a newspaper in the 1950s. The image has travelled across multiple forms: painting, photography, printed reproduction and, finally, a digital archive. Each stage of mediation both preserves a part of it and alters something else. When Gallardo expands it to a monumental scale, the software reaches its own limit: where it no longer has sufficient information, it invents what is missing. This technical process becomes a precise representation of memory. Remembering does not mean recovering what we have lost exactly as it was; the more we try to get closer, the more gaps and distortions appear, along with illegible areas that we fill in through the lens of the present.
The result can be understood as a form of steganographic pixelation. Steganography does not display the message: it conceals it within another surface in order to convey it. In a similar way, the image inherited from her mother becomes a secret form of calligraphy, camouflaged within the material. The pixel is not merely a low-resolution sign: it is the visible unit of a memory which, in order to persist, accepts its own discontinuity. Magnification does not compensate for the absence; it renders it perceptible and produces an image made up of inheritance, loss and invention.
Another decisive element here is the still life, which is linked to the domestic sphere and regarded as a minor genre within artistic hierarchies. Gallardo reverses this position: the decorative and the silent become a smokescreen, a form of revenge that spreads and serves as a tool of struggle. The association between the domestic, the feminine and the minor is dismantled from within, turning murmurs, shadows and secrets into active strategies. The image protects what it contains whilst still conveying it; the pain remains hidden and, precisely for that reason, survives.
The transition between languages and materials restores body, weight and duration to memory. Charcoal evokes combustion, yet also the possibility of redrawing with what remains. Bodies are conceived as compost: matter that does not disappear, but changes state and nourishes other forms. In La laguna de Zempoala [Zempoala Lagoon], hermother’s ashes enter a temporality that extends beyond biography. An urn of raw clay, upon dissolving in water, refuses to confine mourning within a stable container. Its disappearance does not bring a presence to an end; it disperses it. Water, ash, charcoal and clay thus form a sequence of transformations in which losing one’s form can be another way of enduring.
That very tension runs through her paintings, which are devoid of rigid structure and retain the vulnerability of a surface that sags, folds and responds to the space. Each canvas incorporates a small embroidered pixel: a minimal unit that links the digital image with manual labour and restores a sense of intimacy amidst the monumentality of the enlargement. This gesture encapsulates a dual maternal legacy: writing and sewing, two practices capable of inscribing, repairing and transmitting.
The video Una baba [A Drool] takes this research to the very threshold of the body. Saliva, situated between the internal and the external, renders memory as a precarious substance which stretches, resists and threatens to break. Its viscosity reveals the difficulty of letting go and the impossibility of holding on forever. Just like dissolving clay or staining charcoal, saliva insists that the body is not a closed form, but a place of exchange and loss.
The earth-toned palette of the space brings these works together without homogenising them. It unites paint, clay, charcoal, compost and ash within a shared material atmosphere. These are the colours of soil and sediment, of that which settles and can be mixed again. In this setting, works are presented as different manifestations of the same question: how to accommodate an absence without turning it into a monument, how to pass on a legacy without expecting it to remain intact.
Perhaps therein lies the most profound shift in Manifiesto del murmullo. Gallardo turns towards her own history, yet not to shut herself away within it. A mother’s fragmentary memory opens up to a collective experience: the need to devise ways of living alongside what has been lost and to acknowledge forms of knowledge that have survived on the margins, amongst stitches, remnants and hushed voices. The project neither resolves this absence nor fully translates its secret language. It sustains it. In this ethical and formal choice, the autobiographical becomes political once more: the murmur takes on the force of a manifesto, and subtlety asserts itself as a radical form of dissidence.