Jorge Peris: Aladas Almas

The origin of Jorge Peris's project, on which he has been working full-time for the last two years, lies in the intersection of childhood memories, travel, exploration and necessity. Salt, around which Winged Souls is constructed and articulated, has always been part of his life in one way or another, but now he has finally resolved to carry the process of working with this material to its logical conclusion.

His latest projects focus on working with salt as raw material. His journey begins in Murcia, at the salt flats of San Pedro del Pinatar, and culminates in the untamed, spectral landscape of the Uyuni salt desert in Bolivia, where he has experienced at first hand the sensation of being surrounded by this material on all sides at 3,650 metres (12,000 feet) above sea level. The desert is on the Bolivian Altiplano, in the region of Potosí in the Andes, and is the largest salt desert in the world, with an area of 12,000 km2 (4,633 square miles). Despite the industrial exploitation of its resources, the height of the desert is increasing by an average of 5 cm of salt per year.

The exhibition, comprising 170 tons of salt, is organised around a large tower built entirely out of this material, with special emphasis on the construction process, which involves a mixture, in differing proportions, of organic architecture—self-creating and self-organising—and sculpture of the most classical kind. This structure seems to have been carved out of a great block of salt and is full of references and connotations of its own, such as landscape, ruins and literature.

Jorge Peris
Aladas Almas
Winged Souls