Light Travels More Slowly in Salt Water is the project that provisional23 presents for ArteSantander, featuring the artists Mario Manso and Pablo Quesada.

Taking Santander’s maritime environment as its point of departure, the project is structured around water and light as landscape elements that have been reconfigured through a material and industrial logic, conceived as substances capable of being transformed, displaced, and contained. In this way, water and light are reshaped into forms and meanings that depart from the ways they have traditionally been treated throughout the history of art.

Water and light are detached from their environmental and descriptive functions to become structures, surfaces, and devices that, through a reconfiguration of space, reflect on the industrial logics that permeate them, as well as on the systems of transport, circulation, and containment that emerge from them. In this sense, the project can be understood as an investigation into matter in its dual dimension: as a physical substance subject to processes of transformation, and as a medium for sensory experience through which our relationship with the surrounding environment is articulated.