Podium Oslo presents Third Crescent, the solo exhibition by Pedro Gómez-Egaña, opening September 15, 2023. Pedro Gómez-Egaña builds objects and spaces that address the affective and psychological dimensions of saturated media culture and the uncanniness of our technological every day. Third Crescent, his new solo show and performative installation at Podium, Oslo, intervenes the architecture with sculptural, sound and light gestures, rendering a fragile, mysterious and porous space.

A central question in this exhibition is the notion of interface. Traditionally an interface is a point where two realities meet, a term that speaks to the contours of interaction, a porous membrane between insides and outsides, integrity and vulnerability, technology and faith. A space for decoding, and for engagement. The notion of interface also presents a certain kind of eroticism, as an occasion for integrities to dissolve.

The exhibition takes inspiration in the life and writings of Cuban poet Dulce Maria Loynaz. After the revolution of 1960, Loynaz went into what historians have called an “internal exile”. She stopped writing entirely and remained in Cuba, rarely leaving her home. The poems leading up to this period show how political and social realities enter the private to imbue the intimate and the mundane with anxiety and uncanniness.

“…It’s sad to confess it,
but I already feel like its prisoner,
a stranger in my own kingdom,
dispossessed of the goods that were always mine.
There is no road for me that does not run into its walls;
there is no sky that its walls do not cut through.

Making it the spoils of war,
the new structures have rationed my landscape:
of the sun they have left me
only a minuscule portion,
and since the first arrival
an orchestra of birds set on flight.”

—Fragment from Dulce Maria Loynaz, “The Last Days of a House”, translated by the artist