Son[i]a #420
Teresa Solar Abboud

Teresa Solar Abboud (b. Madrid, 1985) began her artistic career in the first decade of the 2000s. After studying Fine Arts at the Complutense University of Madrid and obtaining a postgraduate degree in Cultural Studies, she started working in video, gradually incorporating other media such as photography, drawing, ceramics, sculpture and large-scale installations.

A narrative impulse runs through her entire practice. For example, her most recent series of sculptures, Tunnel Boring Machines (2021-…) explores speculative ways of recounting geological time, while video pieces such as Al-Haggara (2015) delve into her own history and that of her mother and her ancestors. In other works, such as Ground Control (2017), the story revolves around the body and its relationship with matter. In fact, the materials themselves (whether clay, ceramics, resins, ropes, or metals) also constantly narrate themselves through their morphologies, resistance, and sensorial qualities. And in the midst of all of this, her interest in language and the speech act—which features strongly in her life story and generates as much resistance as matter does— also permeates her work. Teresa Solar Abboud is the daughter of an Egyptian mother and a Spanish father. Thus, her relationship with languages, their translation and possible declensions have led her to materialise concepts such as hybridisation, and to work with speech production cavities.

In this podcast, we begin with Teresa Solar Abboud sharing her Notebooks, because they condense the heartbeat of her daily practice. They are repositories of memory that also project themselves into the future and acquire the polymorphic layers of her creative processes. We spend some time talking about her work processes and the material conditions that underpin her practice. We also reflect on questions of scale, on the use of colour, on textures, and on subsurface ecosystems that hybridise the natural and industrial, the past and present.