The Softest Hard, (A Practice of Porosity, Hangar)

Methodology: Allow proximity to rearrange matter

A Practice of Porosity is a living research project that holds space for what is left behind. There is a gentleness in decay, an intelligence that inhabits things as they open towards their own undoing.

2026: Residency Hangar Barcelona, ES

2026: Art Nou, Tandem x Casa RARO, Barcelona, ES

The Softest Hard presents a series of objects that accumulate gestures of failure and fragility during my residency at Hangar, Barcelona. It questions the political community that invests more energy in reinforcing borders than in expanding rights.

Materially, the pieces are constructed from blown glass and the reconstruction of found objects, with multispecies collaborations and low-tech languages. Through alliances with people, materials, and tools in contexts of proximity, I have allowed remnants and relationships to ferment and reorganize into new forms of intimacy.

As part of this research, I commuted the same route every day for three months, observing the places where waste accumulates and documenting both the materials that circulate and those that remain. By placing my attention on materials that, despite being discarded or deemed undesirable, I noticed their permanence within the city.

What began as a poetic gesture within my practice gradually revealed broader logics of extraction, excess, and disposal, as well as recycling systems sustained by marginalized and invisible bodies and forms of labor. At €0.20 per kilogram of iron and €1 per kilogram of aluminum, the prices expose circuits of exploitation and displaced ecological violence.

During this period, I shared a staircase with a space occupied by recyclers, who dismantle found objects daily under precarious conditions. The proximity between their gestures and my own practice generated a productive tension around the material conditions and privileges from which my work operates. Over time, this tension evolved into forms of exchange and reciprocity through the circulation of tools, materials, and care. Some of the recyclers began setting aside fragments for me, while I gathered leftover materials from my walks and from other Hangar residents to contribute to their recycling processes. These relationships became an active part of my methodology of porosity, cultivating more situated and attentive ways of making. The sculptures that emerged embody tangled, often invisible anatomies, assembled from the materials accumulated through these exchanges.

This research unfolds within a broader political context in which the European Parliament has definitively approved the “Return Regulation,” a migration framework that undermines fundamental human rights. The Softest Hard turns attention toward those who sustain the metabolism of a system that simultaneously excludes them, opening a dialogue about the future of bodies and forms of labor that have already been rendered invisible, while questioning political communities that, rather than expanding rights, reinforce borders.

Magdalena Hart