Jorge Peris: Permafrost

Salty tears song 

Upon the brink of an impending tide,

The sea, with fervor, claims its pure domain,

Plic plic, a dance, the waves do confide,

A liquid dirge, a world consumed in vain.

In feast, a mirth, in revelry they dwell,

As waters rise, unheeding hearts astray,

Plic plic, droplets weave a mournful spell,

A song of despair, a trembling array.

Yet in this flood, the spirits stir unseen,

Ancestral whispers on the ocean breeze,

Calling forth memories, a spectral sheen,

Their voices echo through the drowning seas.

Salt, the purifier, in tears will be embraced,

As the world dissolves, a new one to be faced.

— Gian Andrea Poletta fed ChatGPT this prompt: “Hey ChatGPT, could you help me write a Sonnet? It’s about the end of the world, the rise of the seas, a carefree feast, about the spirit of our ancestors and the salt as purifier. Ah, please use the words: Plic Plic. Lastly, could you please help me with the title, I need it to sound slightly ironic.” 

And Abimelech fought against the city all that day; and he took the city, and slew the people that was therein, and beat down the city, and sowed it with salt.
 

— The Bible: King James Version, Judges 9:45.

Permafrost, Jorge Peris’s second solo exhibition with Nicodim, is an invocation of the apocalypse, a prayer sowed with salty tears. Relics of human existence populate the gallery: colored glasses are festively stacked in memoriam of some long-evacuated party; slightly knotted and twisted ropes hang themselves from the ceiling, would-be nooses whose accompanying necks disintegrated in an undefined past. Crystalized salt unifies it all into one cohesive sculpture, a monument to an Earth that once was.