Exhibition "I Saw a Snake Flying" by Maja Escher

The exhibition “I Saw a Snake Flying” draws on the surrealist imagination of folk poetry to evoke an ancient relationship between body, earth, and word. Maja Escher unearths buried symbols — memories the soil has preserved beneath stones — in those distant places where words still hold magic.

Around us, fragments of an inverted world emerge, where borders and binaries dissolve; where the sea burns and summer snows; where lizards rain from the sky and apple trees bear walnuts. Tinted by the colors of the earth, they speak to us of secrets passed mouth to mouth, of ancient spells, winged serpents, and comets fallen into the open sea.

Through alchemy and ritual, the hand transforms humus and language into a single living substance: clay is kneaded and enchanted, transmuted into signs of almost-forgotten alphabets, infused with the resonance of the earth’s belly and the murmur of imagination — all the whispers that remind us: we are still alive.

Marta Espiridião