Making the invisible visible: Paul Klee wrote that this was the challenge of contemporary art. Later, this sentence has become a catch-phrase, a no-brainer. This is the fate of language when words are no longer part of reasoned discourse and become commonplace. Giving the words back their original meaning or filling them with other meanings was one of the purposes of post-symbolist poetry; giving them back their aura through ironic distance or through a novel approach from other artistic codes or formats is Sonesnat proposition.

Recording, deconstruction, dismemory, experience, space, identity, apprehend, fragmentation, distance and leitmotiv are empty, vague, vacuous, innocuous, bombastic, beaten, blurred words like the writer starring in Woody Allen's Deconstructing Harry. They are formulas, clichés, truisms and sophisms like the ones in the famous poem by Joan Salvat-Papasseit, that have become embedded in a language that is allegedly theoretical but that is actually ahistorical, acritical, intuitive, rhetorical, evasive, that accompanies scientific, literary and artistic dissemination in the shift from the 20th to the 21st century, the era, it has been said, of light, quick, facile, pleasing, self-satisfied thinking.

Irony and poetry give the words back their literality and, with it, the possibility of nuance, of clash with the parti pris and of the emergence of the complexity of what we have agreed to call reality. The "recording" of the traces of our own existence over the ungraspable content of "now that you are going / everything stays there" of the song that accompanies the rhythmic movement of the hula-hoop; the diverse, crumbled self of the innocent game represented by "deconstruction"; the other (represented by the pig) systematically and efficiently slaughtered, carved up and minced in "fragmentation"; the fascination for the animated beauty of scanners that, while showing the interior of the self, also make visible the tumours that irremissibly destroy the often-alluded, analysed and dissected "identity"; they are all painful "epiphanies". There are a few more in Sonenat. The most paradoxical one: the dual and simultaneous movement of birth and return to the mother's womb of "dismemory". In short, life.

Margarida Casacuberta