Medir la geografía: nuevos territorios
Biennal B
Mar Guerrero, Julià Panadès, Laia Ventayol
September 2025
In any scenario of uncertainty, art, like other fields of knowledge and practice, is called upon to respond to the old but ever-renewed urgency of standing at the height of events. Whatever that may mean: perhaps to understand them and respond with commitment. Curiously, from the perspective of artistic practice, more interesting than that abstract height, which is no more than a regulating idea, might be height as a dimensional extension of space: that which is concrete and capable of being measurable.
It was thanks to such height that Eratosthenes of Cyrene was able to calculate, with surprising accuracy, the circumference of the Earth over two thousand years ago, by observing the dance of shadows during the summer solstice. In his map of the known world, the Earth appears as a heavy creature, a sluggish animal whose body is traversed by rivers, pierced by seas and surrounded by oceans. It is an early representation of the world as an island. This exhibition brings together aesthetic approaches to geography through the work of Julià Panadès, Laia Ventayol and Mar Guerrero.
Julià Panadès creates his own measuring rods to measure the world on the beach, with the remains of our collective shipwreck: the debris of the Anthropocene. Material traces of human presence in natural environments, waste and rubbish become creative matter for an artist who carries out an attentive observation of his geographical and social context. Through this process, he generates slender totems of a strange beauty whose fragility and precarious balance is a vivid reflection of our own situation and relationship with a contradictory present.
Laia Ventayol surveys the horizon of new landscapes with curiosity and measures its expansion with that of her own body, which appears in her actions linked to personal or collective memory. Her work, often developed through collaborative strategies, investigates the set of relationships that people establish with their surroundings in productive activities that depend on water. At times, she invites us to look for it in an animal connection with the territory, as in the case of the dowsers who scour the land in search of underground wells.
In her latest projects, Mar Guerrero, who develops her practice at an interesting crossroads between art and astronomy, investigates the symbolism of the sphere in a broad sense, placing it in inhospitable places and obsessively tracing its contours in installations that are configured as habitats and celestial maps. Physical and symbolic correlates emerge in the gesture of inverting the telescope. In doing so, the artist raises about the extension of those territories still unknown.
Can artistic practice be, as was Eratosthenes’ experiment, that which serves us to establish new visions of the world? Perhaps we can also learn to measure geography with what we have at hand: to (re)discover new territory, explore the extension of the landscape, draw the shifting cartography of the present. To measure, ultimately, not to make the world finite, but to imagine together other ways of being in it.