LUIS GABRIEL SANABRIA AND SANTIAGO ALVAREZ :EARTHBORNE

14 June - 20 July 2025 Galleria SARP

SARP Artist Residency and Gallery is pleased to present Earthborn, a site-specific installation featuring ceramics, sculptures, sculptural paintings and video by Santiago Alvarez and Luis Gabriel Sanabria. Rooted in clay, fire, memory, and rituals, Earthborn offers an immersive experience that is the result of the artists’ residency period across the Amazon Basin, Colombia, and Puerto Rico communities, where identity is shaped and preserved through tactile processes of creation. 
The exhibition evokes a layered dialogue between the artists' Latin American heritage and the raw elemental forces of Mount Etna. It conjures a space suspended between the sea floor stones and drifting volcanic ash, where native plants become an archetypal embodiment of their artistic practise.
In the first room, a character confined to a wall cries the Mount Etna ashes: these solid black tears are a tangible connection to the fertile volcanic soil, where life emerges from the very foundations of destructive energies. The figure is adorned by native vegetation collected by the artists from the surroundings of Mount Etna: by weaving these natural elements, the artists created a visible connection with the living power of the volcano, making the artwork an extension of the Earth itself.
A table lies at the center of the exhibition space, as a visual representation of Latin America indigenous and other local communities’ everyday life: bowls, pots, plates, cups, and other pieces are arranged as a dinner setting. In this mutual exchange of knowledge through food and craftsmanship, visitors experience the natural processes that drive the transformation of the matter: each piece draws from collective and personal narratives, blending ancestral traditions with contemporary artistic practices.Around a large nest structure made of intertwined branches, leaves, and organic matter, a series of miniature anthropomorphic figures inhabit the space. These sculptural creatures wear wild grasses, straw, and stones: natural elements are embodying forces of the exhibition, in a primal connection between the humans and the Earth. 
Alvarez and Sanabria’s communion with nature finds its spiritual expression in the creation of huge paper mache heads, arranged to form a totem, a monument that speaks to both personal reverence and collective connection to the primal forces of Mother Nature. The stability of these totemic figures becomes movement in the loop video installation, which immerses viewers into the world of a mystic character, who was born from the Earth and fed by the sound of nature.

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