O Inominável (The Unnamable) (2025-26)

(text for the exhibition O Inominável (The Unnamable), curated by Natxo Checa at Galeria Zé Dos Bois, Lisbon, Nov. 2025 - Feb. 2026)

Galeria Zé dos Bois presents AnaMary Bilbao’s solo exhibition, O Inominável (The Unnamable). The homonymous work stems from the artist’s curiosity about the role of the conductor within the orchestral context and the power dynamics assumed by this figure. When the roles of conductor, performer and composer become blurred, this seemingly rigid architecture — who controls / who executes / who is controlled — seems to dissolve. This dilution of the original logic leads the artist to delve into the history of music in order to understand the social, political and cultural implications and repercussions of these structures of control.

During her research, Bilbao observed how, throughout the 20th century, attempts to subvert the power of the conductor’s gesture echoed. It was in this context that she heard the work Sinfonia (1968-1969) by Italian composer Luciano Berio, composed during a period marked by intense political upheaval and the furious emergence of new forms of communication. The piece, composed for eight amplified voices and a large orchestra, articulates, throughout its five movements, multiple literary and musical layers. There are countless gestures of fragmentation in a space that demonstrates excess and the impossibility of grasping the whole, dismantling the traditional model: instead of subjecting the musicians to a centralising gesture, it opens up fissures, frictions and simultaneous layers that escape the full control of any central authority. Incorporating excerpts from the translated version of Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable (translated by the author in 1958 from the original L’Innommable, 1953), the third movement of Berio’s piece, III In ruhig fließender Bewegung (1968), highlights the autonomy of the sound fabric in a multiplicity that self-organises, interrupts and contradicts itself. The use of The Unnamable makes this moment the moment par excellence where the most disruptive notions of control are summoned. The Unnamable, who appears in Beckett’s book, is an anonymous figure, always undefined between thought, word and the impossibility of action, which in turn reveals his inability to be an autonomous, active subject. The final sentence of the novel – “I can’t go on, I will go on” – translates this infinite cycle into a tension between control and freedom, presence and absence, visible and invisible.

This third movement is therefore the structuring core of the piece developed by AnaMary Bilbao. The awareness between what Beckett formulates literarily and what Berio achieves musically — the impossibility of control and the constant oscillation between the search for meaning and collapse — offers the key to thinking about how today, more than ever, this same tension shifts to image, technology, and contemporary systems of meaning production, namely social networks, digital platforms, and artificial intelligence. O Inominável (2025) proposes a field of friction where multiple temporalities intensify and collide, and where Beckett’s unspeakability resonates like a kind of existential mantra that compels us to continue, even though we no longer find meaning in doing so: “Where now? Who now? When now? Unquestioning. Unbelieving. Questions, hypotheses, call them that. Keep going, going on, call that going, call that on.” (Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable). Aware of the legacies of Beckett and Berio, Bilbao problematises them through a new gesture: she submits the excerpt from Sinfonia to an artificial intelligence software that promises to separate instruments and voices from compositions in an unaltered way. However, the system fails. Unable to isolate layers, neglecting instrumental sounds or translating them into noise, transforming female voices into indecipherable moans and preserving only fragments of Beckett (which are themselves indefinable), the failure paradoxically becomes part of the work — a new metaphor for control systems and their inability: a structure designed to control by deception, which manifests, at its limit, the inability to do so.

This technological inconsistency serves as a diagnosis of our times: the crisis of representation, the collapse of certainties, disbelief and fragility in the historical authority of control bodies. A figure reminiscent of something between a paper bag and a cigarette butt stages what we might consider the prologue to the exhibition — chanting the phrase ‘No control, I can’t believe I’ve no control’ from David Bowie’s song No Control (1995), it appears anguishedly resigned to its submission to this entropy. Translating words into sound, sound into noise, noise into image, the exhibition exposes the collapse of power structures that go hand in hand with the desire for control, while also recalling its implications within the spheres of knowledge, gender and identity, and the environment (Nature, in a ‘more-than-human’ consciousness). O Inominável (2025) is distributed among three main figures, archetypal of the three fields mentioned above, attuned to each other and vocalising the sounds-noises that remain from the reinterpretation mediated by contemporary technology that has failed in its promise of faithful restitution.

In the approximately six minutes of duration, the loss of meaning of the sounds is accompanied by the process of image disruption, where the visual sequences take on the form of representative failures, once again produced by technological tools that aim to guarantee a future of transparency and precision. These sequences were subjected to multiple attempts at disruption (and control) by the technological process itself, but also by the creative process. Throughout this process, when the images obtained drifted towards expected forms under the command of AI, they were diverted with images of bacteria, cancer cells, film frames, etc. This deliberate confrontation illustrates the tension between the incompetence of the machine and human impotence in controlling the very destiny of the work by introducing new images to enhance new derivations and meanings. In this context, the software’s inability to restore the integrity of the sound tracks, as well as to maintain the visual fidelity of the images, was not considered an accident, but rather a symptom of an ecosystem where technical mediation amplifies, rather than resolves, the unspeakability originally proposed by Beckett and reiterated by Berio.

And it is precisely in this failure, in this collision of forces, that the work finds its political echo: an attempt to mirror contemporary society plunged into a limbo where neither words, nor sound, nor images can stabilise meaning. The figures that emerge from this process do not represent a new field of control, but rather the fullness of this dissolution on all fronts — bodies that, like Beckett’s voice, persist in a state of suspension between power and impotence, between intention and failure, in the growing impossibility of converting thought into action, in the loss of agency, in the awareness of existence in an unnameable time, one that, rather than resisting, survives, without ever being fulfilled: a time in which what remains of humanity is trapped in an interval where nothing can be fully said, controlled or concluded, but where, paradoxically, it continues to chant the irrepressible need to ‘go on’: Where now? Who now? When now? ... Unbelieving.