SUBMERGED

見えないものの場所

23.07.2025 

What cannot be seen does not disappear, it sinks. It doesn’t dissolve or vanish; it simply changes state and, in moving, finds shelter in a mute and invisible zone that is anything but empty. It exists elsewhere, in depths that do not seek spectators, where time is not linear and matter is not solid but emotional, rarefied, suspended. Beneath the smooth surface of things, beneath the words we speak to avoid truly listening to ourselves, beneath every smile that holds a crack, settles all that we lacked the courage to fully live. It does not vanish; it accumulates. It stays. Like sand at the bottom of an abyss, like a gesture halted midway, like a thought that found no language, like a desire silenced by lack of space or courage. The bottom is not absence, but invisible presence: a submerged fullness, a dense and silent archive inhabited by everything we’ve forgotten without ever ceasing to feel.

There is a world that pulses beneath the world. An inner geography with no boundaries, made not of horizons but of layers and depths. Every pain we gracefully avoided, every word left hanging, every love unfinished, every question unanswered, all of it remains, waiting for a broader time, for a threshold that allows return. Thus, nothing is truly lost; it stratifies, becoming emotional seabed, geology of the soul. The underneath is alive, even in its silence. It breathes, it holds, it reworks. And the descent into it is not a sudden act, but a slow slipping, almost imperceptible at first, a slight tilt, a hairline fracture in the rhythm of our days. Time begins to distort, light dulls, air thickens until it feels like water. All at once, images dissolve, along with names, roles, and the masks we’ve learned to wear to stand upright in the world. We are not descending downward, but inward. It’s not a matter of space, but of awareness. The pressure rises, not outside, but within: in the heart, in the flesh, in the deepest folds of the psyche.

In this space, the rules of the surface no longer apply. Here, what truly shapes us is preserved. Nietzsche wrote that some depths do not want to be reached, and yet it is precisely there that the core of who we are silently accumulates: the unsaid, the unfinished, the repressed. Identity is not only what we remember of ourselves, but also, and perhaps more so, what we’ve stopped looking at. Everything we lost, abandoned, or forgot in order to survive has not disappeared; it has only changed form. Like the bodies of fish that, once life ends, sink slowly into the depths, disintegrate, and become marine snow, a fine powder that falls for days, weeks, without ever stopping, so too do our submerged emotions and memories transform into something new: invisible, yet persistent. The words never spoken, the gestures stilled, the thoughts left incomplete, they fragment, settle, and sediment into inner landscapes, the geological fabric of our being.

The bottom, then, is not silence: it is sacred archiving. A cold magma of unprocessed experience, a dark womb where all that we cannot yet integrate still finds a place. It does not die, but ferments, transforms, prepares. And here, with the exhibition “SUBMERGED – 見えないものの場所”, M.A.D.S. Art Gallery invites every artist to suspend the search for light, to renounce the obvious, the visible, the reflected, and instead to sink into the blind zone, the fertile opacity of what does not show itself. Leaving the surface is not an act of escape, but a gesture of radical truth. Not to represent, but to evoke. Not to explain, but to listen. Art becomes immersion, an act of presence within invisible matter, an attempt to give body to the repressed, density to the unfinished, poetic substance to what has been excluded from the visible. Here no images are constructed; traces are received. Nothing is asserted; shadow is contemplated.

And then, something happens. Not with noise, not with climax, but from within, a subtle shift, a threshold opening not upward, but into a wider, more livable inner self. It may not be a true resurfacing, but a change in density: the water lightens, the pressure eases, and darkness begins to become transparent. A breath passes through matter, like the first breath after a long apnea: slow, full, essential. A memory begins to float, and then a detail resurfaces, not to be shown, but to be recognized. What returns to the surface does not seek explanation or validation; it longs to be received. And in that instant, something softens. What had been hidden no longer demands to be understood; it simply asks to be allowed to exist. And then, the bottom is no longer the place of loss, but the place of origin. Not a storage of pain, but a secret reservoir of life. And perhaps it is precisely from there, from that silent, stratified, intimate depth, that the re-creation of the self begins. Not as an act of will, but as a form of deep listening. Not to become something else, but to more fully inhabit who we already are.

Concept by Lisa Galletti Senior Art Curator