From May 24 to June 14 2025

Born out of a residency in the Atacama Desert in Chile, SALAR explores the cosmogony of saline landscapes, the remains of a lost ocean, now threatened by the intensive extraction of lithium. At the crossroads of archaeology, ecology, and myth, this immersive exhibition questions the links between matter and memory, fecundity and extinction.

The path opens up to a crystalline cavern, an initiatory space to cross to access the exhibition.Suspended salt garlands form a vibrant mineral vault, while sprinkled cotton canvases tremble at the slightest breeze.The ground traces a path between white dunes that resemble inverted stalagmites. A soft light, diffused by candles and shards of mirrors, evokes the glitter of mica. This fragile and luminous salt cave acts as a threshold to another regime of perception, between the underground world and celestial revelation.​ At the center of the exhibition: ARKAE, a major piece designed as a mineral monstrance, a fusion of the funerary and the fertile, containing a salt disk extracted from a Chilean salar – a symbol of ancient memory and possible renewal.

On the walls, large canvases painted with red ochre extend this exploration.Extracted from volcanic soil, this living material carries an archaic memory within it.Used since prehistoric times to paint caves, ochre embodies an ancestral gesture, a pulse of the earth.Each trace becomes a breath, a mark of the connection between the human and their telluric origin.

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By summoning creation stories and archaic symbols, Solène Kerlo reactivates primordial gestures through living materials: beeswax, ochre, brass, and salt. Her work weaves a dialogue between the sacred and ecology, between the spirituality of materials and the cycles of regeneration. SALAR takes shape in a transdisciplinary approach, giving rise to an immersive experience, between intimate perceptions and collective imaginations. In these times of depletion of soil, bodies, and narratives, SALAR invites us to reconnect with a consciousness of the sacred, where nature becomes the center and matrix once again.

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