ENSALADA MIXTA
ENSALADA MIXTA began as a long-term act of collecting. Inspired in part by the experience of learning Spanish and living within Spanish-speaking cultures, words ending in the letter « a » were gathered from A to Z without concern for grammatical hierarchy. Verbs sit beside nouns, adjectives beside adverbs, creating a democratic archive in which language is treated first as material rather than communication.
The title itself – “mixed salad” – reflects the methodology. Words are harvested, sorted and recombined according to four broad thematic fields: Religion, Politics, Sex and the Natural Environment. These categories function less as fixed subjects than as containers through which cultural values, desires, fears and collective myths reveal themselves. The resulting texts occupy an ambiguous territory between poetry, conceptual art, lexicon and collage.
As with many of Wood’s projects, sound precedes image. The musicality of Spanish, its rhythm, vowels and endings, becomes an organising principle. Meaning emerges through juxtaposition rather than explanation. The project therefore owes as much to systems of classification and permutation as it does to literature. Individual words retain their autonomy while simultaneously becoming components within larger structures.
ENSALADA MIXTA also extends an ongoing interest in language as a found object. Rather than inventing new vocabulary, the work extracts existing words from everyday use and repositions them within an artistic framework. The gesture is simple but transformative: language becomes both subject and material, capable of revealing unexpected relationships between culture, memory, ideology and desire.
“Tectonica” is particularly strong because it destabilises the previous categories. Suddenly everything becomes geological rather than ideological. Language itself starts to feel seismic.”