CARLOS MOTTA
When Falling Feels Like Flying
PARIS
SOLO SHOW
22.11.2025-14.01.2026
1. EXHIBITION TEXT
No one
bears witness
for the witness
These words, borrowed from the poet Paul Celan, appear at the start of No One (2025), Carlos Motta’s new video and the emotional heart of his exhibition at mor charpentier. What does it mean to bear witness? Can a witness be more than a bystander? Is it enough to record and share what we see? How can we resist in meaningful ways? What if we are among those the government wants to disappear? Who bears witness for the witness?
After Celan’s text fades, the artist appears in a tightly cropped closeup of his head and shoulders, surrounded by darkness. Over the course of forty-five minutes, Motta attempts to look straight ahead at the camera without blinking—an impossible task that turns his eyes bloodshot and watery, and at last brings him to tears. No One is a collaboration with the composer ELO, whose sorrowful soundtrack evokes the thrum of heavy machinery and the drone of an insect swarm or weapons of war, mixed with Motta’s amplified breaths. Slowly, the sound swells into a symphony of melody and noise, before returning to the spareness of a piano and a desolate horn. Fifteen minutes into the video, a distorted male voice begins enunciating a series of words—among them, equality, identity, inclusion, justice—which stutter, echo, and fade. These are the words banned from use in the US
federal government under Trump. When words are erased from a nation’s vocabulary, people are erased as well: immigrant, LGBTQ, transgender, victim. If Everyman is the archetype for all members of society, then No One symbolizes those whom society excludes—the marginalized, the despised, the disappeared. While the video might appear to be a self-portrait, Motta here represents No One.
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Installed in the same space as the video is a series of miniature sculptures, which lends its name to the exhibition. Each work in When Falling Feels Like Flying (2025), just five centimeters tall and cast in silver with emerald inserts—speaking to Colombia’s violent history of extraction—consists of a pair of figures. One person stands while holding the full weight of the second: draped across the erect figure’s shoulders, hanging by arms or legs, or carried in front like an offering or pietà. It is a burden never abandoned, transformed into an eternal embrace. The second room of the gallery contains recent photography and drawing, dating from 2019 and 2021. With references to the history of poetry and art—Dante’s deviance from the straight path, Goya’s depiction of brutal discipline, Mapplethorpe’s mirror onto pleasure and pain—these works present Motta’s earlier formal and conceptual explorations of self-portraiture and visibility, transgression and punishment, recuperation and resistance. A new sculpture, El Auto de Fe (2025), is positioned in the center of the space. Made from ceramic painted the blackest of blacks, it is another portrayal of No One, burned alive by the Inquisition for “sins of the flesh.” All that remains are charred pieces: feet engulfed in flames that curl like locks of hair; a peaked cap engraved with demons; a rosary with the devil on a burning crucifix; two hands connected by rope, fists raised as if in a final act of defiance. Tracing a vicious lineage of expulsion and elimination through to today, Motta continually shifts from witness to subject and back again. We are all joined in this eternal embrace; sometimes we bear the weight, and sometimes we are borne by others.
