In Mina, French-Peruvian artist Natalia Villanueva Linares enclosed bells in earth, transforming objects associated with sound and gathering into instruments of silence.
The exhibition, presented at Comfort Station in Chicago in 2022, included small bells buried in bags of soil and a compact mud brick containing a bell. Its title means “mine” in Spanish, suggesting both possession and the hidden value of something held beneath the surface.
A sound object made silent
Villanueva Linares approached the bell as an object designed to call people together, mark an event or raise an alarm. Covering it with mud removed its audible function while preserving its symbolic charge.
The work developed from a dream the artist experienced while studying in Paris. An earlier version imagined a room filled with mud and a large bell barely visible at its centre. After moving to Peoria, Illinois, she began making bricks from rainwater and the area’s clay-rich soil.
Brick of Mina condensed these ideas into a small object. The bell remained physically present inside the earth but could no longer be seen or heard, turning silence into the work’s concealed treasure.
Materials carrying memory
Villanueva Linares studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris and frequently worked with ordinary materials as if they retained histories and emotional energy. In Poignée, she reduced a gold door handle to powder. For a 2010 project, she shredded the contents of her bedroom and sorted the fragments into thousands of plastic bags.
Mina continued this interest in transformation, multiplicity and containment. The artist planned the project as a three-part installation, including a room filled with rain and a later group of bricks in which golden bells would be completely hidden.
Through simple substances, earth, water, metal and plastic, the exhibition gave physical form to an experience that could not be displayed directly. Silence became not an absence, but something constructed, protected and held within matter.