The Dream of Things

In a world saturated with utility, where efficiency is celebrated as the highest virtue, a group of works emerges that seems to say: enough. Usefulness does not make something beautiful. Functionality does not equal freedom. In the group exhibition The Dream of Things, curated by Sol Astrid Giraldo, objects rebel against themselves in a kind of absurd, political theater where their uselessness becomes a poetic force.

The show, presented at the Medellín location of Galería La Cometa from April 10 to June 5, brings together a diverse group of artists who deconstruct the everyday in order to reveal, among the fragments, deeper questions about memory, faith, violence, and language.

The Dream of Things

When the Bottle Opener Refuses to Open

The curatorial premise is provocative: what do things dream of when we no longer use them, when we no longer look at them, when their usefulness has dissolved? The answer isn’t given in a manifesto, but rather through a series of installations, sculptures, and assemblages where objects abandon functionality to become delirious signs. There’s a kind of poetic autoimmunity at play: things attack themselves in order to be free.

From the outset, the curatorship offers a critical reading of objects as historical and political agents. Shoes, bottle openers, typewriters, or candles are not merely tools. They are paused memories. They are ideological devices. They are the wounded bodies of a production system that, once obsolete, also becomes absurd.

Glenda León: Language in a Wig

Glenda León’s piece Writing in My Head is perhaps the visual synthesis of this poetics of dysfunction. An old typewriter, intervened with a mane of artificial hair, is transformed into a mute animal, a literary artifact without text. León plays with the tension between the mechanical and the organic, the archaic and the sensitive. Stripped of its function, the typewriter becomes a thinking head, a body that reminds us that every word uttered carries both bodily and political echoes.

Sonnia Yepez: The Sacred in Wax

Sonnia Yepez’s works create a domestic altar where fragility becomes a form of resistance. In Cluster of Faith, a paraffin carpet unfolds like a delicate, reverent landscape. The lit candle — a daily ritual in countless Latin American households — is here solidified, frozen mid-combustion. Yepez captures the moment when fire turns to memory, and with it, prayer, waiting, and hope.

In Dial, the artist replaces a radio speaker with a wax structure, creating a conceptual interference between sound and matter. There is a poetics of disappearance here: the sound we no longer hear, the vibration turned ghost. In a hyper-connected world, Yepez compels us to listen to what is fading.

Alejandra Arbeláez: Critical Botany

Alejandra Arbeláez’s works, Automatism and De-Mount, delicately explore the relationship between nature and the manufactured world. Using skeletonized leaves, she builds visual systems that evoke industrial gears and fragile structures. In Automatism, she confronts the paradox of progress: the same force that produces comfort also destroys ecosystems. In De-Mount, she speaks of instability as a way of inhabiting — of a world constantly being assembled and disassembled, like our relationship with land and memory.

These works are fragile as a warning. They are not meant to be touched, but rather understood with the subtlety of someone who sees how a dried leaf can explain the collapse of an entire system.

Johan Gil: Between Fear and Light

One Step Away, an installation by Johan Gil, is unsettling. Dozens of porcelain shoes hang from the ceiling, referencing a popular and ominous practice: throwing shoes over power lines to mark territories of control or illicit trade. The piece includes sensors that alter the flicker of a light bulb according to the viewer’s proximity, replicating the heartbeat in states of alert. Here, the body reacts before the mind: it is fear that illuminates.

Violence is suggested. The viewer becomes an intruder. Walking among the suspended shoes is at once an aesthetic experience and a physical warning.

Daniel Gómez: Meticulousness as Subversive Act

Daniel Gómez’s work occupies a significant part of the exhibition — and with good reason. His sculptures of everyday objects — paperclips, pencil sharpeners, locks, labels — carved in noble materials such as alabaster, silver, graphite, or bronze, transform the banal into relic. Each piece is a reference overlooked due to excessive familiarity. By carving a pencil sharpener in graphite or a bottle opener in recycled glass, Gómez not only subverts material logic: he turns the artistic gesture into an archaeology of the present.

His work Silenced, made of molten lead and nylon, could go unnoticed were it not for its symbolic density. What gets silenced when an object no longer fulfills its function? When it transforms into a sculptural body? Gómez turns object into subject, posing a crucial question: who decides what is art and what is merely a thing?

A Curatorship by Sol Astrid Giraldo: The Uprising of Objects

In this edition of the group show in Medellín, curator Sol Astrid Giraldo offers a sharp, philosophical gaze on objects and their expressive potential in contemporary art. Giraldo — known for her ability to intertwine critical thought with aesthetic sensitivity — proposes a narrative where “things” are not inert matter but entities that think, question, and resist their own uses. Through her curatorial text, she activates a reading in which objects and art “wage battles against their own essence,” deactivating their original function to become impossible forms, loaded with critique, memory, and formal dissent.

Giraldo’s curatorial voice runs through the exhibition like a pulse, inviting viewers to question not only the displayed objects but also their own daily relationships with things. Under her direction, the pieces lose their utility to gain symbolic density. The curatorship offers a visual essay on the weight of matter in times of virtuality, and how the domestic, the fragmented, and the flawed are part of contemporary sculpture’s language. The exhibition becomes a laboratory of thought embodied in form, where each artist dialogues with the idea of the “thing” as cultural and symbolic agent.

What Do Things Dream Of?

Perhaps they dream of being seen differently — of being touched not by hand, but by gaze. Perhaps they dream of ceasing to be tools and becoming metaphors. In The Dream of Things, objects shed their obedience and gain a voice. And that voice, rather than shouting, whispers from the details, from materiality, from error, from nostalgia.

In a time where virtuality governs our interactions, this exhibition reminds us of the weight — and power — of the tangible. It forces us to think about what we no longer see, what we no longer hear, what we no longer touch. It invites us to dream with things — and, above all, to reflect on what it means to be surrounded by them.