Testimonies of Time

CRAFT

23 Sept

Borja Cáceres on wood, memory, and the art of slowness

The story does not begin in a studio; it starts on a mountain trail, with Borja Cáceres (Barcelona, 1990) bent under the weight of a fragment of a dead tree strapped to his back. The wood is cracked, scarred, and worn by time. For most people, it would be considered a waste; for Cáceres, it is testimony.

Since 2018, the artist has been climbing mountains to recover fallen branches and trunks abandoned by time. These are not pristine pieces of material but survivors of storms, frost, and erosion. “Each fragment carries a story,” he says. “I don’t choose them; they choose me.”

Back in his workshop, the pace slows even further. A single piece of wood may stay with him for years. He works into the secondary xylem—the tree’s memory bank—removing just enough to reveal its inner voice. He does not carve to impose; he waits, listens, and intervenes only when the material allows.

This long-term project, which Cáceres calls CHRONOX, is not about transforming wood but about accompanying it. It is a practice that values patience, attention, and fragility in a cultural landscape dominated by speed and spectacle.

Time Versus Acceleration

What seems like a simple gesture—a man carrying fragments of wood down a mountain—takes on a different weight when placed in the broader artistic and cultural context. In an era where novelty and immediacy often define both art and society, Cáceres deliberately slows everything down. His practice values process over product, presence over result, and reverence over control.

By refusing to impose a new form, he challenges the traditional idea of the artist as master or creator. At a time when extraction and consumption continue to deplete natural resources, his minimal interventions suggest another way of relating to materials: one based on care rather than domination.

Reflections

Alongside his sculptures, Cáceres has developed a photographic body of work in collaboration with Javier Abad. These images, paired with short poetic texts, are not documentation but conceptual reflections on the inner landscape of his practice.

El primer paso captures the urgency of the body before the mind comprehends, while Búsqueda dwells on the vulnerability of searching without ever finding. In Diálogo, the silence between hand and wood becomes its own language, and Carga speaks of the visible and invisible weights we choose to carry. Constancia honours persistence—the repetition of gestures until the impossible yields—while Revelación marks the moment when nothing changes externally, yet perception shifts entirely. Finally, Huella reflects on the traces that time leaves behind, whether welcomed or not.

Through these works, Cáceres makes visible the emotional and conceptual dimensions of a practice that otherwise unfolds slowly and invisibly.

Why It Matters

Placed within today’s cultural context, his work can be understood as both practice and critique. It resonates with contemporary art movements that seek to decentre the human, recognising material as active and agentic, while also offering a quiet challenge to systems that prioritise speed and innovation at any cost.

Cáceres’s insistence on presence and care highlights a central tension in cultural production: the demand for novelty on one hand and the need for depth and continuity on the other. His practice poses uncomfortable yet necessary questions: What does it mean to create art without the promise of novelty? Can we value patience in a system that thrives on immediacy? And what can be learned from materials that survive not through force but through adaptation?