Quimbara Quimbara unfolds as a conversation that moves like a pulse, a vibration between past and present; between landscape, body, and memory. Through dance, photography and material, this exhibition proposes an experience that exceeds the image and enters the sensorial universe as an act of recognition and care. It brings together for the first time at Sorondo Projects the Venezuelan photographer Silvana Trevale and the artist of Jamaican descent Theresa Webber, weaving between them an affective net where the Caribbean is not a geography but a living intelligence, a rhythm that persists in the body and in memory.

The word Quimbara, comes from the 1974 salsa song Quimbara made famous by Celia Cruz and Johnny Pacheco. The word itself doesn’t have a direct meaning in Spanish or in any African or Caribbean language, it functions more like onomatopoeia, a rhythmic chant or exclamation rooted in Afro-Caribbean musical tradition. In the framework of the exhibition, Quimbara becomes a symbol of celebration and resistance. In a time that insists on fragmenting everything, the exhibition restores a language of communion.

Silvana Trevale’s photographs throb with a contained and profound pulse. In collaboration with art director and stylist Daniela Benaim, the series explores drums, ceremonial chants, and joropo not as documents but as living entities: forms of thought that breathe in image. Trevale, who has dedicated her gaze to historically marginalized communities, does so from a place of relation, never of distance, guided by respect and tenderness. In her portraits there is no misery or exoticism, but dignity, clarity, and beauty. Beauty understood not as ornament, but as an ethical gesture: the possibility of seeing the world with care, with the same love with which one listens to a drum echoing the heartbeat of a collective soul.

Most of the images that comprise the exhibition are from the series Curiepe (2025), where Trevale documents the homonymous town’s key ceremonies and figures, from weddings and childbirths to the vibrant feast of San Juan. These celebrations embody the syncretism between Catholic traditions and the African spiritual practices brought to Venezuela through colonization. This fusion, expressed through percussion, dance, and song, lies at the heart of Curiepe’s festivities and is as a vital expression of Venezuelan cultural heritage.

Theresa Weber’s work, in contrast, approaches Caribbean carnival as a global, nomadic, borderless place. To her it is a visual outcome of creolization, with an inherent long tradition of protest and liberation.  Her sculptures and installations embrace sensory profusion: textile, beads, mosaics, acrylic paste, fragments of surfaces recalling the costume. The volumetric surfaces of the works inhabit rituals imbedded in crafts, and the material memory in the object.  Ornamentation becomes assertion; color, necessity; brightness, memory. For Weber, the decorative is not embellishment, but a strategy of resistance, where the exuberant confronts the erasure of history. The artist’s practice transforms the body into an archive, the gesture into inscription. “History,” she has said, “inhabits the skin, and every rewritten surface remains an act of breathing.”

Within this polyphonic framework, the ideas of Francesca Gargallo, Ildefonso Gutiérrez Azopardo, and Cándida Gago García emerge as both theoretical and affective substratum. Gargallo understood African rituals as territories where the spiritual and the political are inseparable, places where “ancestral memories are renewed to resist erasure.” Gutiérrez Azopardo and Gago García, from the anthropology of gesture, propose that Afro-descendant dances operate as a language of resistance: each movement articulates community, each rhythm becomes a form of thought.

The exhibition echoes these teachings: presenting Quimbara Quimbara at Sorondo Projects also implies a return, an intimate affirmation. The gallery’s founder celebrates with this exhibition her own Afro-descendant origins, intertwining the gallery’s genealogy with the heartbeat that sustains the Caribbean. The exhibition thus becomes a sign of continuity, a collective gesture uniting personal memory, collective history, and artistic practice within a single flow.

In this exhibition, territory is not a place to return to, but a presence carried within. It is emotional matrix and symbolic refuge. Even when fragmented, identity is rebuilt through rhythm, expands in color, and blossoms in the alliance between body and landscape. As Gargallo’s thought suggests, “the acceptance of difference is not only political but also poetic: it is the way life recognizes itself as plural in order to remain shared.”

Thus, Quimbara Quimbara does not seek to represent the Caribbean, but to summon its energy, its indestructible vitality. It is an exhibition that listens and celebrates, that sees in rituals, music, and dance not only inheritances, but languages of the future. A song that Sorondo Projects offers as an offering and a reunion: an affirmation that even in dispersion, identity can continue to beat to the rhythm of the collective.