(S)Obras Completas

Group show

Antonio Pichillá Quiacaín | Antonio Romero | Armando Cristeto | Comunidad de Solentiname | Ernesto Cardenal | Guillermo Núñez | Gustavo Pérez | Gracia Barrios | Graciela Iturbide | Juan Castillo | Lin Calle | Marta Palau | Maya Goded | Paz Errázuriz | Peyote y la Compañía | Roser Bru | Terry Holiday | Yolanda Andrade

Since its opening in September 2020, MEMORIA has developed a program committed to Latin American contexts and to artistic production in environments of dictatorship, repression, and silencing. The gallery’s name itself embodies a dual commitment: to remember and revitalize what has been relegated to the margins of official history, and, at the same time, to create a space that challenges the canon, placing at its center artists, bodies, and discourses that operate from the margins and that affirm the need to build other possible futures.

(S)Obras Completas, the exhibition with which the gallery celebrates five years of activity, is not conceived as a closing chapter or a complacent retrospective. Rather, it opens a period of reflection: to review what has been done, to reactivate memories that still resonate, and to chart new horizons of possibility. The exhibition offers a journey through the traces and voices of those who, from diverse geographical locations, have produced works imbued with memory, confrontation, sensitivity, and utopian vision.

Divided between the Carabanchel and Centro venues, the exhibition establishes thematic axes that mirror and complement each other: on one hand, political disobedience, resistance in contexts of repression, and the affirmation of queer and dissident subjectivities; on the other, ancestral knowledge, manual labor, and the relationship with the land as alternative models of connection and social organization.

In both cases, the curatorial approach seeks to articulate erased memories and practices born in marginality, ways of doing things that challenge the norm, that foster care and networks, and that propose alternative grammars of the common. In a web of intergenerational and transnational dialogues, made up of collective actions and intimate gestures, the exhibition underscores the urgency of imagining other ways of inhabiting the present, ways that transcend hegemonic frameworks.

Isabella Lenzi, curator and art critic, writes the text that accompanies the exhibition.