What do we risk by coming closer?
Curated by Gabriela Román González
With works by Emilia González Salgado
Presented by Not The Owners and CASA at Brixton House, marking the beginning of Lines of Flight: For Another World of Possibilities, CASA’s year-long programme dedicated to interdisciplinary creation and transnational exchange rooted in Latinx and Caribbean diasporic perspectives.
20 - 28 November 2025
What do we risk by coming closer? ask for attention, patience, and the courage to stay when closeness begins to unsettle. Emilia González Salgado works invite to deepen our interest in how objects, bodies and spaces meet through scent - a material she uses to build encounters that are both tactile and atmospheric, shaping artworks that activate only when someone steps close enough to inhabit them.
The exhibition takes this encounter as a point of departure:
To come closer is never a neutral act.
Getting close changes how we see and understand. It dissolves the safe distance that lets us remain observers and turns us into participants in what we are looking at. It places us inside exchanges that unfold slowly, in the complexity of looking closely at others and at the worlds they carry, without ever fully claiming to know them.
Writing & reviews
Dweller Magazine | NTO Art Journal
Palma que Camina, Clay, steel, porcelain, rubber, vapour-distilled essences. 2024 - the piece draws its name from the ‘walking palm’ (Socratea exorrhiza), a species whose slow shift in search of light becomes a quiet metaphor for movement, adaptation and the search for ground. The object brings together eleven vapour-distilled essences gathered over the course of a year in London - scents taken from fabrics, residues, plants and small domestic moments. The piece unfolds only through physical approach. The viewer must lean, stretch and press the pumps connected to the flowers for the scents to emerge.
Pa’l bailador; Clay, wood, gardening wire, rotating motor, scent distilled from cotton T-shirts worn while dancing with 2025 - “Pa’l bailador” - named after Joe Arroyo’s (y la verdad) song - traces dancing as a place of collective closeness. The scent, distilled from cotton T-shirts worn by Juliana Monsalve, Santiago Valencia, Felipe, Carolina Orlando, Gabriela Román, Bryan Giuseppi, José Oliva, Pilar Seivane and Emilia González after a night of dancing, carries the heat, humidity and friction of bodies moving together. It is the residue of a shared movement. "El gesto es familar, te acercas, te agachas, rodilla entre piernas y piernas entre rodillas, mueves los pies, te mareas dando vueltas, cantas y sudas en salas y cocinas, en bares pegajosos."
Suelo de Páramo (Ground Study No. 9); Merino wool, mercerised cotton, elastic, vapour-distilled scent of Antisana ground Ongoing - This artwork evokes the Ecuadorian highland ground through textile and scent. The digitally knitted pieces are based on studies of 10 x 10 cm sections of Ecuadorian páramo, abstracted into color and texture, and then reconstructed into larger compositions. Looking closely at the surface becomes a way of examining how distance shapes our sense of place - what settles on the surface, and what stays suspended in memory.
Acolitar: seguir o ayudar; Clay, borosilicate glass, hand-blown glass, peristaltic pump, wood, hardware, scent distilled with Felipe Pineda from plants sent from her mother’s garden, 2025 - unfolds as a conversation held at close range with a friend: shared words, mismatched cadences, gestures that find and lose each other like quick laughter or the longing for a familiar sound. The scent holds the small shifts that shape familiarity - the pauses, the slips, the closeness that builds over time.
