Espai 13

Exhibition program

Fixations per Minute

Author

Jota Mombaça and Iki Yos Piña Narváez Funes

Dates

21/07/2023 — 22/10/2023

Place

Espai 13

Curated by

Yaby (Beatriz Ortega and Alberto Vallejo)

The Earthquake Is Intact is a continuation of the artistic research project Black Eldorado (We are the earthquake) begun by Iki Yos Piña Narváez Funes and Jota Mombaça in 2020 to explore Western narratives around geology, extractivism and healing. The new presentation of their collaboration focuses on the poetic and political agency of minerals, as well as on the temporal and philosophical relationship between the materials that make up the earth and the incarnated experience of Indigenous and Black bodies from Abya Yala and the Caribbean.

Two ancient technologies deriving from clay form the basis of this exhibition: ceramics and bahareque, a system for building houses used by Indigenous communities since time immemorial. They are both situated ways of interpreting and explaining the world that contrast with the book as a Western-colonial narrative device, complicating the modern idea of the text as a journey or window. 

The traditional construction of a bahareque wall in this underground room reactivates its original purpose as a refuge and establishes a temporarily disruptive area in the choreographies of global domination, inviting visitors to Espai 13 to breathe literally under the ground. A video made by Jota Mombaça juxtaposes shots of the inside of the artist's mouth with images of a mining site. 

Jota Mombaça (Natal, Brazil, 1991)
Interdisciplinary artist and writer who lives and works between Amsterdam and Lisbon. Their research is currently concerned with basic ways of sensing anti-colonial imagination and the relationship between opacity and self-preservation in the experience of trans artists of colour in the global art world. Their work has been presented in various institutional settings, such as Kadist San Francisco (2022), Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Venice, the International Artist Studio Programme in Stockholm, 22nd Sydney Biennial or the 10th Berlin Biennial, among others.

Iki Yos Piña Narváez Funes (Caracas, Venezuela, 1984)
Cimarrona-fugitive. Afro-Caribbean writer, performer, artist. She researches anticolonial archives and sexual dissidence. Lives and works in Barcelona. Part of the Ayllu collective, the Periferia Cimarronas cooperative and the experimental radical Black thought group In the Wake, at Espacio Afro. They have participated in various texts including Devuélvannos el oro, No existe sexo sin racialización, (h)amor trans and Futuro Ancestral. Their work is part of the Museo Reina Sofía Collection and they have taken part in the Sydney Biennale, the Triennial of Arts and the Kochi Biennale.

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