She has learned to spit and amuse herself by leaving little puddles of saliva that she spreads with her hand or foot. She now sits on my lap, looking towards me, intertwined, she reaches out her hands towards my face and she puts her fingers in my mouth, she wants to hold my tongue, touch it, stretch it. It’s weird and annoying, but I let her explore, the teeth, the lips, the saliva. She sticks her tongue out, she says aaaaaaahhhh smiling, insistent, she wants our tongues to touch. Someone says that’s not right, that there are too many bacteria in the mouth. I think how she came out of me a little over a year ago, how she continues to feed from me every day when she sucks, milk that comes out from me and that my body continues to produce, and it still seems magical to me. She says the first words, mom, boob, water, no. Our tongues touch and tickle.
An Oral Exhibition takes the tongue as an organ, a muscle of the mouth, like a member or an extremity that gestures in the darkness and humidity of the oral cavity and that communicates the exterior and interior, linking our body with the environment. An Oral Exhibition wants to penetrate us as we penetrate it and each of the projects it brings together; It invites us to suck, to squirt, it appeals to the body, the heart, the flesh, it avoids the eye—the gaze—as the only possible organ to approach artistic practices. If the eyes are like two marbles tied by a thread to our head, the tongue is a piece of meat that lives in the dark, humid cave, full of odours, bacteria, traces of our eating, sexual, loving, toxic, liquid practices. And that comes out to make the air sound against the teeth, against the palate, that moves to lick suck taste give pleasure and irreverence, that makes the mouth not just a hole but the lair of the beast, that is not only an orifice or an entrance, also an exit channel, flow, threshold; a meeting point, of contact, of flavour, of pleasure, the possibility of eroticism.