Opaque Intimacies
Anna de Castro Barbosa, installation view of All that you touch, you Change. All that you Change, Changes you, 2025. Courtesy of the artist and THIRD BORN.
The work of Anna de Castro Barbosa triggers a sensation akin to looking at non-mammalian animals: hesitant recognition, nervous disbelief. Listening to her switch between three languages, her gaze a pale, almost translucent blue, I wonder whether she has a sternum at all—the bone humans evolved to live outside of water.
Resulting from a two-month summer residency at THIRD BORN, All that you touch, you Change. All that you Change, Changes you marks de Castro Barbosa’s first solo exhibition. The main hall, lined with surgical-blue vinyl flooring, features works that evoke the body without representing it directly. Abdominal retractors, speculums, silicone, human hair, eggs, and lingerie are combined to create sculptures that are simultaneously alluring and grotesque.
Chest jealousy (2025), a bust cast in patinated bronze, lies on the floor like an armor painstakingly removed. The hollow shell—stuffed with egg-like synthetic orbs —suggests that its imagined interior has scattered throughout the exhibition. For de Castro Barbosa, this sterilized dismemberment is a way of confronting the fundamental despair of never being able to fully access the interiors—the thoughts, the memories, and the organs—of her lover. Similar to Pascal Quignard’s obsession with the impossibility of attending the night of his conception, this is an anguish as old as love itself.
The inviolable distance from the lover—accentuated, in de Castro Barbosa’s case, by almost ten thousand kilometers separating Paris from Mexico City—is like a phantom limb: absence is not a clean cut but a lingering sensation, leaving the memory of something that once belonged to you. De Castro Barbosa’s prosthetic forms extend this feeling into the material space, embodying both the persistence of desire and the impossibility of resolution.
Anna de Castro Barbosa, Regressive touch II, 2025. Stainless steel, silicone, 4.33 x 7.17 x 1.42 inches. Courtesy of the artist and THIRD BORN.
That impossibility condenses in the figure of the egg, which appears to represent the object of desire throughout the exhibition. An opaque vessel, the egg resists transparency yet invites projection. De Castro Barbosa’s sculptures evoke the female body—corsetry, lingerie, tights, bulges, and dark stains—despite her lover at the moment being male. In this hermaphroditic haze, doubles and inversions proliferate.
The doubling begins in the main hall, where works are displayed in pairs: those on the right mirror those on the left, whether through form, material, or title. Borrowed from a Paul Éluard poem about the loss of meaning caused by separation, La dégustée: J'étais si près de toi (2025) faces La déglutie: Que j’ai froid près des autres (2025), just as Les sourdes I (2025) stands opposite of Étude pour un opéra de sourdes (2025).
The motif of the double continues in the secondary galleries, which, when viewed from a certain distance, appear to contain identical arrangements. Similar to a “spot-the-difference” puzzle, it is only up close that the variations surface: marbles morph into surveillance cameras, while gynecological instruments take on an unexpected seductiveness. Here, doubling is no longer about symmetry but distortion, revealing both the tenderness and the menace of desire: twins as much as rivals, partners as much as counterfeits.
Anna de Castro Barbosa, Étude pour un opéra de sourdes, 2025. Silicone, laying eggs, tights. 5.43 x 4.17 x 2.52 inches. Courtesy of the artist and THIRD BORN.
Distributed around the gallery, Les encores I, III, and IV (2025) each consist of two or three thin needles of patinated bronze welded together. They read as an abstract representation of lovers: romantic in their delicacy yet also worm-like in their scale and form. Their tenuous geometry evokes a fragile system of incorporation in which the boundary between self and other is constantly negotiated. Intimacy here is never pure fusion but a porous coexistence, where what enters and what remains outside leaves a trace inscribed in the relation itself.
If love is always a relation of surfaces, de Castro Barbosa’s sculptures insist on the fact that surfaces keep traces. Metal remembers warmth, glass preserves fingertips, silicone retains pressure. All that you touch… ultimately stages a mediation on desire’s impossibility, where intimacy remains opaque, double, and deferred. De Castro Barbosa’s practice, anchored in material estrangement and haptic surfaces, inhabits the line between seduction and disgust, inviting us to dwell in the unease of what cannot be fully known.
Anna de Castro Barbosa: All that you touch, you Change. All that you Change, Changes you was on view at THIRD BORN, Mexico City, from September 5th to October 11th, 2025.
