Intersticio is pleased to present his new exhibition in Madrid, Lo otro maravilloso, including works by Nora Aurrekoetxea, Sarah Bechter, Michael & Chiyan Ho and Augusta Lardy.

It is on “the other side” where the symbolic matrix that gives life to these works is found. The other side -that of sleep, emotion, intimacy, and silenced cultures-, not being governed by the European rational norm, offers greater connection to “the real” as an irreducible and irrepresentable force from logical systems and closed codes. From their different intimacies, the artists of this collective exhibition show how the experience of the wonderful takes place. When this happens, the attention numbed by the cultural norm is awakened and the gaze broadens its sensibilities by integrating “the other” into the cartography of a magical reality.

The fragile, vulnerable to being transformed and even broken, becomes support structure in the work of Nora Aurrekoetxea. The braid pattern turns the hair filament into a tough fabric or lattice. Formed by a multiplicity of hard and elastic units, the braid is a symbol of everyday life and strength. Isolated from the body that carries it or makes it and reproduced in bronze, it refers totemically to the spaces of intimacy and care, revealing the wonderful in its apparent simplicity.

Sarah Bechter shows the ontological density of the soft and tender worlds, conjuring them into vaporous landscapes that subvert the invisible VS visible antagonism. Thus, reality which escapes the dualistic hierarchy of the Western mind – and which also does not wish to disarm its nature-claims its existence. Using transparency, Bechter finds a place in the representational space for the affections that are generated through touch, in everyday and domestic environments.

A polyphonic network of knowledge and traditions, fetishes, projections and echoes is expressed in the work of Michael and Chyian Ho. Navigating between-voices as communicating bodies, they display a mode of attention that allows them to interpret both the
more audible frequencies of western hegemony, like the traces of other sounds whose potency disrupts the landscape. His artistic practice relaxes the modes of perception of the Western ego to attend to the mystery of a world that appears as real as wonderful.

From the transfusions that occur between day and night, vigil and sleep, Augusta Lardy works the dream. As a continuum, shared reality and dream intimacy appear in permeable, hybrid stages. In her painting, color composes the emotional sense of ritual scenes where the subject abandons identity. Lardy places faceless bodies in “other” scenarios that, not participating in the cultural social norm, could be called magical.

Sara Torres
Passau University, Germany

Nora Aurrekoetxea Etxebarria's CV (PDF)

Sara Bechter's CV (PDF)

Michael and Chiyan Ho's CV (PDF)

Augusta Lardy's CV (PDF)

Exhibition's Press (PDF)

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.

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 te 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 stating a ritual of the intimate. In her work we sense a preciosity constructed through precarious and old materials, as well as the research of equilibrium between order and disorder, control and chance, reason and emotion.

Related Text by Raúl Lorenzo Pérez + Artist Bio (PDF)

Marina G. Guerreiro's CV (PDF)

Exhibition's Press (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.

Lorena Ancona's CV (PDF)

Exhibition's Press (PDF)

Intersticio is pleased to present Antes todo esto era campo a series of screenings programmed by the independent producer Lejos lejos. The cycle begins with Scene I. Verás un árbol a mitad del camino, including the works of Adrián Balseca, Paz Encina and Alberto Martín Menacho. It continues with Scene II. Dios es mi amigo este barrio es mi novio, with works by Julieta Gil & Sofia Acosta, Inês Lima and Francis Alÿs.

Antes todo esto era campo is an audiovisual program composed of two scenes in which there are different ways of relating to the environment both rural and urban through memory. The first scene occurred between 10th September and 17th October; the second, between 28th October and 20th November, both in the lower room of Intersticio.

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

The agency and plant sensitivity were present in the three films that coexisted in the first scene of the cycle: Verás un árbol a mitad del camino. To these memories, in the second scene, Dios es mi amigo este barrio es mi novio, they add the domestic space and the city as scenarios for resistance to the idea of a unique way to observe and live them.

Andrea Celda and Elisa Celda
Lejos lejos

Related Text for Scene I + Artists Bios (PDF)

Related Text for Scene II + Artists Bios (PDF)

Exhibition's Press (PDF)