Like white noise, but reversed, saturated—perhaps a black noise. The exhibition Spare Memories by Hector Garoscio begins with sound—deep, insistent, and all-encompassing. In the dense, stretching layers of this sonic landscape, one hears a dual origin: the underground water table, where water is trapped within geological formations, and the atmospheric soundscape of Abyssal Flow. There is something ritualistic about this Om, stripped of religious overtones, leaving only its vibration and incantatory force.

Both photographer and musician, Hector Garoscio weaves together different mediums to explore the memory of objects—just as one speaks of water retaining memory. The spare pieces that lend the exhibition its title are fragments of a motorcycle frame, a Harley Davidson that once belonged to the artist’s father. Draped in translucent fabric, its contours subtly revealed by the shifting folds, the motorcycle is far from a wreck; rather, it evokes the iconography of the recumbent effigy. Like furniture covered to shield it from the passage of time, the veiled motorcycle (Recumbent Rest)—modest yet majestic—becomes the exhibition’s formal matrix, in an act of augmented ready-made.

Playing the role of both artist and scavenger, Garoscio repurposes these mechanical remnants, stripping them of function. In the Wells series, engine cylinders transform into projectors, upending the usual archaeology of photographic devices. These solitary objects could belong just as easily to a bathyscaphe—a deep-sea exploration vessel—as to an early motion-recording device. In the Aperture series, embedded images, like precious gemstones, are housed not only in the interstitial spaces of memory but also within these enigmatic, discarded artifacts. If these objects are relics, they exist both in the photographic moment and in their transformation into sculptural forms. Captured during a journey to Mexico, the underwater images projected within the cylinders verge on abstraction. Water, dissolving the contours of reality, creates iridescent effects; bluish reflections shimmer along the cylinder walls, echoing the moiré shadows of an underground cave. These framed images, reminiscent of Petri dishes, fracture traditional scales of space and time, linking celestial imagery to the microcosmic life of the infinitesimally small.

The artist-as-speleologist—haunted, perhaps, by the ghost of Robert Smithson—does not simply explore the earth’s crevices but engages with the concept of deep time, where stratified layers of past, present, and future collapse into one another. In the Shores series, photographs taken in the cenotes of Yucatán—those seemingly bottomless “blue holes” of freshwater—are embedded in the engine’s rocker covers, like jewels set into metal. These “sacred wells”, formed during the Ice Age, were revered by the ancient Maya as thresholds to the afterlife, places where offerings were cast into the depths. If photography is a luminous imprint, fossilizing a moment in eternity, here it becomes a meditation on geological time—one that transcends the human scale and dissolves the boundaries between past and future.

In Water and Dreams (1942), Gaston Bachelard explores the elemental poetics of deep water, its millennia-o ld stillness concealing buried secrets: it is “the dark memory of darkness (…) It draws the dreamer inward, inviting them to descend into their own depths. Whoever gazes long into deep water feels the call of a world beyond light.” Perhaps it is this same descent—a free fall into the depths of both self and world—that Hector Garoscio invites us to undertake, composing a cryptic symphony of sound and light.

By Eline Grignard, translated by Clara Granet, 2025.