La Presencia del Otro (The Presence of the Other)

La Presencia del Otro (The Presence of the Other) is a series of four ceramic and crochet sculptures that investigates the disappearance of listening as an ethical and communicative practice in algorithmically mediated digital environments. Situated at the intersection of media and communications theory and practice-led visual arts research, the series draws on Byung-Chul Han's critique of The Expulsion of the Other (2018) in contemporary society to examine how digital communication technologies structurally erode the conditions necessary for genuine dialogic encounter. In the series, ceramic forms (rigid, self-enclosed, fired into permanence) materialise the hardened identities we construct and inhabit, while crochet elements (soft, porous, hand-worked) embody the vulnerable communicative act of reaching toward the Other, the search for the listener. In works containing multiple structures, the ceramic forms may alternately represent the self and the Other, held in tension by the connective tissue of crochet. By translating a media-theoretical problematic into material form, the series generates new knowledge about the relationship between communicative breakdown and identity formation, extending the artist's prior research in Narrow Identities (2024) from questions of self-representation in digital spaces to the more fundamental question of whether the Other can be encountered at all within the communicative architectures that now mediate our social lives.