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)

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

Press Release + Artists Bios (PDF)

Floor Plan (PDF)