We read at night, perpetuating the childhood ritual that precedes sleep. We tell as it was told, embodying the text, the vibration, the hesitation, the rise and fall of a voice that from time to time is interrupted by that of the maker who listens. Everything comes from before, everything is yet to be done, Cristina titles one of her pieces, and so it is: the stories creep into us, we carry them inside us, we live in and thanks to them. In this exhibition, I imagine myself in another interior, that of a drawing of forms that hang, fragile, unstable, finely connected, just like the time that touches us. Here we are enveloped by shapes, colours, materials and techniques, as if inhabiting could also take place in a model, in a guitar, in a pitcher, in a whale.

It doesn't matter if it is inconclusive or incomplete, we need the story as the weaver needs her skein or the plaiter her reed. A connection with the world, the one we inhabit and the one that precedes us, which begins in another cord even before we are born. Cristina's work is full of very fine connecting threads, transmitters of memory, of failures, of imagination, of desire, and also of that which we do not always manage to tell, or at least not with words. And it is precisely on this delicate line, between telling and not telling, between the word that is spoken and the word that is silenced, where water, fire or the stars, bone, river cane, mud, cypress, cedar, ebony or fir, rosewood, oak, tanganyika, zebrano, mansonia or rattan come into play. All these materials are containers of knowledge and tradition, of emotion and experience, anchors that interconnect people and things through different territories and times.

Cristina observes, listens, without fear of tinkering, of mixing, as she retains that ancestral, childlike ability to make with her hands, to put things together and see what happens. And she does so in the company of others, who often form part of her processes, making possible a scale that moves with ease between what she is able to embrace with her arms, with her hands, almost with her fingers, and the construction of dreamlike, personal universes, in which she invites us to enter, to remain. Her landscape shines sandy and golden, the one that gives rise to many of her concerns, the echo of the family home that stirs the personal memory and pushes us to keep on doing, to keep on telling, so as not to forget. To tell and to listen, in the face of loss, of absence, in a here and now that requires more than ever the encounter, the skin brushing lightly against the tinkling of the word.

Text: Beatriz Alonso