Intersticio is very pleased to present Given Time, Marina G. Guerreiro first solo exhibition with the gallery and in the UK. Thanks to the generous support of the Cultural Office of the Embassy of Spain in London.

My grandfather used to go for walks and sometimes he would come back with a stone, that he would give to one of her daughters.

Keep that stone, look how beautiful it is.

Now that he is gone, I contemplate those stones and think of his walks in the countryside and the gaze that chooses a stone in between a thousand, the criteria or the sensibility that makes him focus his attention on an object and extract it from its habitat. Would he had chosen a river stone on a volcanic land? Would he had focused his attention on a semi-buried malachite in the slope of a mountain? We feel surprised by the presence of an object that seems not to belong to where it is placed, as if a previous implicit beauty already existed in the chain of exceptionalities that have placed it there. And even this seems like a universal criteria, it unveils a mystery when we discover that someone else choses something you will never put your attention on. Is one of the few moments when we can realize, with some astonishment, that a sensibility di erent to yours occupies another body. We can only feel true love if
we are capable of letting ourselves be fascinated by this challenge.

Thinking about this has made me realize that, when my grandad used to gift me a stone, was a nice gesture, but he also gifted with absolute seriousness. A common stone is an object with no apparent value, but within the act of gifting, more than a stone what you gift is the gaze that found the beauty in that stone, as an invitation to join that discovery. The stone is nothing more than the container of two gazes, looking to found each other on its interior.

Marina’s walks around the neighborhood have so many things in common with my grandfather’s walks and his stones. On her way to do some errands, she directs her gaze to those places where people abandon objects. Sometimes, she looks for something specific, others she allows herself be taken by a disperse attention, others she ask for help to her friends and she claims a rescue of very specific characteristics. When she keeps an object, she carefully looks for a specific place in the studio; there it is going to spend some time living together with the rest of the elements, consolidating an identity, growing, transforming, sharing the space.

The emotional cycles coordinate and modulate the creative process to points that sometimes we cannot understand, nevertheless, Marina’s exhibitions have something of a mood catalogue. She likes to leave the body open to the emotional processes, without escaping the appearance of contradictory moments or rhythm ruptures. This way, the contemplator, can recognize his or herself in the same life that resonates in between this ssures. If we go inside them, we can recognize two forces fighting with no pause in their work: an entropic nature that devours with no pity the fragile structures of the human and psychology in crisis trying to keep an order and create sense in the middle of the absurd. Time is such a terri c vortex and before the panic it provokes, we play to administer it as a child plays to represent an adult’s profession. Marina uses agendas and calendars, tools from rationalism but that also function as charms or spells, protecting us from that ancient horror. They are like a small cage, where we keep the days from scattering over life, turning it into chaos – the reason why they have something compulsive and esoteric.

Even sometimes they go unnoticed, presents also have to do with the administration of time. We have dedicated the time normally reserved for something else to choose, construct and acquire the gift. When we fabricate it, like a craft, we are not giving a mere object but the time we dedicated to it. Maybe that is reason why so many kids give this sort of presents, those who have little more than their own time. Time coagulates in a gift, the gift its charged of spirit. This might let us realise all the energies involved in the material manifestation of the object, in any other way we would not be able to make sense of it. The gift nurtures itself from the a ects and the debts, transcribes emotions that go from forgiveness to desire, lightly uctuating through the frontier of the manifested and the unmanifested. It is point of encounter and exchange, a friendly currency. If the exchange is between an object and a ‘thank you’, this should not have less value than the object itself and it is thus how gratitude may shiver, it is conscious of its disequilibrium and desire to inundate it all.

I return home and there are quiet stones placed on the furniture; they don’t stand books or weight papers, they don’t do anything apart reveling a gratitude held in time.

Text by Raúl Lorenzo Pérez

Marina González Guerreiro (A Guarda, Spain, 1992) explores her practice through an installative approximation to different mediums like sculpture, video, photography or painting, the artist revises the iconographic imaginary around the idea of happiness, putting special attention to the phenomenons related with the emotions and the management of stress as well as the construction of an idealized nature. Her creative process starts with the accumulation of materials, becoming the studio a space for trial, where objects and images from the most diverse origins live together staging a ritual of the intimate. In her work we sense a preciosity constructed through precarious and old materials, as well as the search of equilibrium between order and disorder, control and chance, reason and emotion.

Download Marina G. Guerreiro's CV (PDF)

Intersticio is pleased to present Decapitar al caimán the first solo show exhibition in Europa by artist Lorena Ancona (MX, 1981). For this occasion, the artist presents old and new pieces, researching the ethnology of the materials as well as its relationship with the historic process and the memory, traversing the personal and the collective.

Jaws of the abyss as access to a cave, in America the caiman is an animal associated with the land. Is in this relation between interior, ground and water that his presence represents fertility, as well as respect and veneration for nature and territory.

To ‘Decapitate the cayman’ refers to the Mayan Myth of renovation and creation of the world, related to the idea of inundation where the image of the cayman is used. It emerges as a mythic creature symbolizing the Earth and, when it is decapitated, blood spreads up from its head, or rain, or esencial liquid for the creation of a regenerating world.

The cayman’s capacity to move both in water and land, surrounds esencial ideas of landscape and makes it the guardian of the precious water, relating its figure to agriculture and particularly corn. This seed has been venerated because of its development during prehispanic times as the fundamental source that originated and nurtured the American civilizations, giving the possibility for thousands of years of dominating a complex territory in its wild nature.

Starting from an exploration of local materials, prehispanic traditions and symbology related to the south-east of Mexico, the artist takes as a reference passages from the Codex of Madrid and the Codex of Dresde. Both testimonies have been the very few to survive the conquest, most of them having been burnt on the ‘Auto de fe de Maní’, when Fray Diego de Landa incinerated several sacred objects and hundreds of Mayan codexes.

At the vortex of an era when nature it’s approaching its limit of imminent wear, to ‘decapite the caiman’ seems like the fundamental ritual of detachment and regeneration.

Lorena Ancona (MX, 1981) works with sculpture and ceramics, weaving through the historiography of dyes, pigments, natural materials and Mesoamerican places. His work is the result of a research-based practice that questions the intangible displacements of forgotten traditions, heritage and identities. Using speculative techniques as an artistic methodology, her work is focused in the analysis and identification of mineral and ethnic biocultural environments. Ancona has studied at the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Paris and at Escuela Nacional de Pintura Escultura y Grabado La Esmeralda. Recently, she has participated in group shows at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris or the Carreras Múgica gallery in Bilbao. This September she will take part on a symposium at the British Museum in London that will discuss the Mayan blue and its cultural and historical value.

Download Lorena Ancona's CV (PDF)

Download Exhibition's Press (PDF)

Intersticio is pleased to present Antes todo esto era campo a series of screanings programmed by de independent production company Lejos lejos. The series starts with Scene I. Verás un árbol a mitad del camino, including works by Adrián Balseca, Paz Encina and Alberto Martín Menacho.

We leave the house together and walk the long, narrow path that leads to the tree. The wind accompanies us, it smells of jasmine. We enter the jungle, where ghosts remind us of what we must not forget. With pain, we went out onto the sidewalk and found ourselves among holm oaks. The sun beats down on the neck, the dogs are attentive. We get to my neighborhood, your neighborhood. There are flowers. We approach the tree and fall. We fall into a ditch so deep that it takes us back home.

All this used to be field is an audiovisual program divided in two scenes in which there are different ways of relating to the rural and urban environment through memory. The first scene takes place between September 10th and October 17th; the second, between October 28th and November 20th, both in Intersticio’s downstairs room.

The works presented in the program allow us to experience other people’s memories, turning them into our own, thus opening up possibilities for understanding the other. Memory is encrypted in the environment: trees and rivers contain childhood memories, mountains and holm oaks tell legends and dogs harbor ancestral fears.

The agency and plant sensitivity are present in the three films that coexist in the first scene of the cycle: You would see a tree in the middle of the road.

Holm oaks preserve collective memory and take part in legends in Mi amado, las montañas (2017), by Alberto Martín Menacho (Madrid, 1986). In a small Extremaduran town where his family is from, vultures perform rituals, the inhabitants exchange knowledge between generations, and a young woman begins a new path.

In Paz Encina’s work (Asunción, Paraguay, 1971), the tree becomes a sort of spiritual guardian of memory. Outraged by the massive deforestation in Paraguay, Paz fights for the preservation of the forest and the protection of the communities that inhabit it. El aroma del viento (2019) brings together images of the Gran Chaco forest together with home movies taken during the Stroessner dictatorship period. Dreams intersect with memory, generating a new family memory that is contained in the tree.

The dynamics generated by extractivist politics and its environmental consequences in Latin America are issues that run through the work of Adrián Balseca (Quito, Ecuador, 1989). Recently, Adrián has presented his work at the 34th São Paulo Biennial, which has as one of the curatorial premises the verse of the Amazonian poet Thiago de Mello: Faz escuro, mas eu canto [Though it’s dark, still I sing], as a call to resistance in the dark times we live in, specifically in the Brazilian context. The values ​​that underlie the occupation and violence exerted towards the territory, as well as the impact of the technification of work are questions that Adrián investigates in The Skin of Labour (2016), configuring an uncertain landscape that represents a rubber plantation in the Ecuadorian Amazon. The latex collection containers take the shape of a hand, a ghostly presence that embodies the historic labor relations in the region.

We get to my neighborhood, your neighborhood. There are flowers. We approach the tree and fall. We fall into a ditch so deep that it takes us back home.

Andrea Celda y Elisa Celda

Lejos lejos

Paz Encina (Asunción, 1971) is a filmmaker. She graduated with a BA in Cinematography from the Universidad del Cine de Buenos Aires. His first feature film Hamaca paraguaya (2005) was premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in the Un Certain Regard section, where she won the Fipresci best film award from the specialized press. It also won other outstanding awards such as the Luis Buñuel Award for the best Ibero-American film and the Prince Claus Award for the film’s production. In 2016, she premiered her second feature film, Ejercicios de memoria in the Zabaltegi section of the San Sebastián Festival and received important recognitions such as the FICCI Award for the best documentary and the Critics’ Award at the Brasilia Festival, among others.

She has also made several short films and installations such as Supe que estabas triste, Hamaca Paraguaya (the short film), Viento Sur, commissioned by Gulbenkian Foundation, the Río Paraguay trilogy and the Tristezas de la lucha trilogy, composed by Familiar, Arribo and Tristezas, Hamaca Paraguaya (the installation) and Notas de Memoria, urban installation to commemorate the 20 years of the discovery of the Archives for the Memory and Defense of Human Rights in Paraguay.

Her work has also been exhibited in spaces such as Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, the Harvard Film Archives, the BAMPFA / Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive and the MoMA in New York. In 2018, she held her first individual exhibition of installations and short and long-length works at Fundación Texo. In 2005 she founded Silencio Cine, the first Paraguayan platform for independent film production, producing her own works and those of other Paraguayan filmmakers. In 2016 she founded Silencio Lab, a platform from which she gives seminars for the training of young Paraguayan talents. She is currently working on her next feature film, La memoria del monte, which includes sound, video and photography installation.

Adrián Balseca (Quito, 1989) is an artist who studies the historical-economic processes that have been relevant for the consolidation of the modern development project in Latin America.

Balseca was recently selected for the 34th São Paulo Biennial: Faz escuro, mas eu canto (São Paulo, 2020/2021) and osloBIENNALEN First Edition, Oslo (2019 – 2024). His recent group and individual exhibitions include: Cosmopolis # 2: rethinking the human, Centre Pompidou, Paris (2019); 21st Biennial of Contemporary Art Sesc_Videobrasil | Imagined Communities, São Paulo (2019); Counterinformation, 45 National Artists’ Hall / On the reverse of the plot, Santa Fe Gallery, Bogotá; The Unbalanced Land, Madragoa Gallery, Lisbon (2019); Estela blanca, Ginsberg Gallery, Lima (2019); Bearers of Meaning. Contemporary art in the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Collection, Museo Amparo, Puebla (2019); Draw a Line to Make a Landscape, Alexander and Bonin, New York (2018); Event Horizon, OTR Espacio de Arte, Madrid (2017); Energ (ethics), Monument to the Heroes, Bogotá (2017); DURA LEX SED LEX, BIENAL SUR, Rosario; Horamen, Casa del Alabado Museum of Pre-Columbian Art (2017); The Skin of Labour, Madragoa Gallery, Lisbon (2016); Ultralocal, CEAAC, Strasbourg (2016); New Mariano Aguilera National Award 2015-2016, CAC, Quito (2016).

In 2018 he received an honorable mention at the 14th Cuenca Biennial: Living structures. Art as a plural experience, Cuenca (2018) and the 2019 Han Nefkens Foundation – CAC Quito Video Art Production Award. He has received the Mariano Aguilera National Arts Award 2015 – 2016, CAC, Quito (2015); Scholarship and Commission Program 2015, Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation – CIFO, Miami, (2015); Paris Award, 12th Cuenca International Biennial: Going back (2014) Brazil Award, CAC, Quito (2013), and the 1st Honorable Mention, Mariano Aguilera National Hall: (Des) figurations, CCM, Quito (2007). Balseca was a founding member of the group La Selecta-Cooperativa Cultural, and part of the community art collective Tranvía Cero, both based in Quito.

Alberto Martín Menacho (Madrid, 1986) is a filmmaker with a degree in Visual Arts from the Haute école d’art et de design – HEAD in Geneva. He is currently an artist in residence at the Casa de Velázquez, Academia de Francia in Madrid. His first feature film in development, Antier noche, is part of the Ikusmira Berriak residency at San Sebastián International Film Festival and The Screen – ECAM. His work has been presented at art centers and film festivals, including the Musée de l’Elysée, the Filmmuseum in Munich, the Journées de Soleure, the International Entrevues Festival in Belfort or the Rotterdam International Film Festival. In 2018, his film Mi amado, las montañas received the award for best short film at Las Palmas International Film Festival and the Penínsulas award at Curtocircuíto International Film Festival.

Lejos lejos is an independent production company dedicated to audiovisual production and programming. It emerged in 2018 among a group of filmmakers and cultural agents working collectively to develop projects acting as an intermediary agent between the artistic scene and the film industry. They program in cultural centers, festivals and cinemas involving themselves in all phases of production.

They are currently producing Se van sus naves, by Óscar Vincentelli (co-production with Dvein Films), Tetuan, Tetuán, طتوان , by Adrian Schindler, (in collaboration with Anna Manubens and with the support of MACBA and CNAP) and El alto de las palomas by Alberto Martín Menacho. They are in the distribution stage of Oscar Vincentelli’s La sangre es blanca (Flash Competition Award at FID Marseille 2021 and Penínsulas Award at Curtocircuíto 2020).

Their films have been presented at festivals such as IDFA (Holland), Curtocircuíto (Spain), FID Marseille and Documenta Madrid (Spain). They have curated exhibitions and programmed in cultural centers and cinemas such as Kino Tonalá and Cine Tonalá (Mexico City), Byte Footage (Argentina) or Nave Pilarica. As part of their collective work process, they participate in educational activities through workshops at the Museo Nacional Reina Sofía and Inland Campo Adentro.

All this used to be field is an audiovisual program divided in two scenes in which there are different ways of relating to the rural and urban environment through memory. The first scene takes place between September 10th and October 17th; the second, between October 28th and November 20th, both in Intersticio’s downstairs room.

The works presented in the program allow us to experience other people’s memories, turning them into our own, thus opening up possibilities for understanding the other. Memory is encrypted in the environment: trees and rivers contain childhood memories, mountains and holm oaks tell legends and dogs harbor ancestral fears.

The agency and plant sensitivity are present in the three films that coexist in the first scene of the cycle: You would see a tree in the middle of the road.

Holm oaks preserve collective memory and take part in legends in Mi amado, las montañas (2017), by Alberto Martín Menacho (Madrid, 1986). In a small Extremaduran town where his family is from, vultures perform rituals, the inhabitants exchange knowledge between generations, and a young woman begins a new path.

In Paz Encina’s work (Asunción, Paraguay, 1971), the tree becomes a sort of spiritual guardian of memory. Outraged by the massive deforestation in Paraguay, Paz fights for the preservation of the forest and the protection of the communities that inhabit it. El aroma del viento (2019) brings together images of the Gran Chaco forest together with home movies taken during the Stroessner dictatorship period. Dreams intersect with memory, generating a new family memory that is contained in the tree.

The dynamics generated by extractivist politics and its environmental consequences in Latin America are issues that run through the work of Adrián Balseca (Quito, Ecuador, 1989). Recently, Adrián has presented his work at the 34th São Paulo Biennial, which has as one of the curatorial premises the verse of the Amazonian poet Thiago de Mello: Faz escuro, mas eu canto [Though it’s dark, still I sing], as a call to resistance in the dark times we live in, specifically in the Brazilian context. The values ​​that underlie the occupation and violence exerted towards the territory, as well as the impact of the technification of work are questions that Adrián investigates in The Skin of Labour (2016), configuring an uncertain landscape that represents a rubber plantation in the Ecuadorian Amazon. The latex collection containers take the shape of a hand, a ghostly presence that embodies the historic labor relations in the region.

Download Exhibition's Press (PDF)

The exhibition is now open by appointment only.
Please contact london@interstic.io if you would like to visit.

SUPER Preview and Intersticio, in collaboration with Valeria Biamonti, are delighted to present Latent Longing, an exhibition featuring works by Nora Aurrekoetxea, Jack O’Brien and Alfredo Rodríguez.

Entirely subtle yet startlingly emotive. Humble materials and abstract lines do anything but alienate; the exhibition is striving and succeeding, beautifully seductive. Of a personal, sometimes tortured, but truly sober kind, Nora Aurrekoetxea’s iron Makila sticks reach, reinforce, and thrust. Distorting, warping, and scratching into a formal exploration between structure and ornament. The intimate and impassioned calm of Alfredo Rodríguez’s work is visible in the crystalised ephemeral glances that hang around bodies in spacetime. And the intensely curious and vulnerable work of Jack O’Brien, whose materials are deployed with a poignancy and wit, is charged with the erotic. Gentle inspections of notions like shame and taboo. There is something latent—in the truest sense—manifesting here. Aurrekoetxea navigates and exploits the tension between the cultural embedded sphere and materiality. With O’Brien’s rubber, silicon and curls of dried flowers, there is no soppy veneration of marginalized materials. Instead, there is a kind of magnanimity
towards them. Rodríguez’s devotion to the photographic process per sé leads to a unique engagement with the medium. Almost as a rejection of the transient inadequacies of the digital. No apathy is to be found in the deftly and honestly explored ambiguities of the abstract and yet concrete yearning behind these works. Aurrekoetxea, O’Brien, Rodríguez: three artists differently and diligently forging away at the overt tangibility of the abstract, reaching out to something present yet invisible. The works are positively earnest, and they extend an invitation to come closer, to touch with our eyes.

Valeria Biamonti

Nora Aurrekoetxea (Bilbao, 1989) is an artist who develops her practice through writing, sculpture, performance and installation. Her work explores the meeting points between the tangible and intangible, the materiality involved in the emotions, interactions and personal intimate relationships between humans as well as the surroundings they inhabit. Aurrekoetxea is interested in exploring the relational, symbolic and linguistic qualities involved in the material, as a starting point to force encounters or displacements between the physical and the emotional (untouchable). Her installations pursue a radical instability where materiality wants to achieve its own autonomy. She holds a BA in Fine Arts from the University of the Basque Country (Bilbao, Spain) and a MA in Sculpture by the Royal College of Art (London, UK) and is currently studying an Advanced Sexology Postgraduate course at In.ci.sex. (Madrid, Spain). She received the Botín Foundation Scholarship in 2017 and has been an artist in residence at BilbaoArte (2015), Cité Internationale des Arts of Paris (2018), the Solomon R. Guggenheim of New York (2018) and Youkobo Art Space, Tokyo (2022). She has been awarded with the Basque Government production grant (2018 and 2019), the ARCO prize of the city of Madrid (2020) and ERTIBIL (2020 and 2021). Recent shows include a solo exhibition at Intersticio (London, 2020), Juan Silió gallery (Madrid, 2020) or group shows like Claro del Bosque at Intersticio (Madrid, 2020) and We Are Always On Danger Of Magic at Rodriguez gallery (Poznan, 2021). Her work is part of the permanent collection of the museum Ca2m (Madrid, Spain) and Centro Botín (Santander, Spain). Aurrekoetxea is represented by Intersticio and Juan Silio she lives and works in Holland.

Jack O’Brien (Boston, UK, 1993) explores the relationship between the built environment, material, culture and marginalised aesthetics. His practice juxtaposes industrial and craft materials alongside found and personal objects including steel, wood, dried flowers, socks, printed paper, horse-hair braid, rubber, concrete and latex. Drawing on industrial, fashion design, image-making and architectural practice, the artist creates emotive, direct sculptures which consider the political and ideological histories of consumption and the production of desire. Jack O’Brien’s work has been widely exhibited in solo and group presentations, at a number of artist-run organisations that situate themselves at the core of the emerging-London art scene, alongside well-respected LGBT venues and galleries in the UK and internationally. Between 2016 and 2021, these have included White Cubicle Gallery, clearview.ltd, Pervilion, One Room and Becky’s (all London). International exhibitions include KEM (Warsaw) or Peres Projects (Berlin). Jack O’Brien lives and works in London.

Alfredo Rodríguez (Madrid, Spain,1976) works around the photographic medium, subjecting it to experimental processes of variable complexity in his studio and laboratory. As a starting point in his practice, Rodríguez usually takes images referring to the body that ends up being transformed into an equivocal presence, moving away from the singularity of the physiognomy and approaching an idea of expanded flesh. The time of chemistry, photosensitive materials, light, his partner’s body and the material imprint of the photographic go through all the phases of this process, giving rise to a desire to erase or to a fading of the time of the image. In this way, his research pursues a maddened conservation of the ephemeral, by (or ‘while’) trying to provide the whole set of events and materials with a stable permanence, as if it were a crystalisation. Rodríguez is represented by Espacio Valverde in Madrid and has recently exhibited at the Museum Centro de Arte 2 de Mayo (CA2M) in Madrid, Montecristo Project (Sardinia), Matadero (Madrid), Sala Arte Joven (Madrid), ATM gallery and the Istituto Europeo di Design, among others. He studied photography at Art School 10 and specialized in the History of Photographic Processes at ESCRBC in Madrid. Alfredo Rodríguez works and lives in Madrid, Spain.

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