Te llamo cuerpo [I Call You Body] is part of the exhibition series Territories in Transit / Solo Duo, a platform for exchange and visibility that connects artists from different institutional and geographical contexts. Each edition sets two artists in dialogue – one invited by a partner institution, one based in the Comunitat Valenciana – their exchange unfolding across two venues and two exhibition periods. This format encourages the cross-pollination of perspectives, languages and territories, building collaborative networks that extend the reach of contemporary artistic practice.
Te llamo cuerpo brings the artistic practices of Marco Giordano and Irene Grau into dialogue. At its heart lies the relationship and tension between the body and the more-than-human world – a broad horizon that takes in plant and mineral species alongside the infrastructures woven into our urban ecosystems. The exhibition title speaks to the act of recognising more-than-human elements, whether natural or artificial, as bodies – subjects with an essence of their own, with which we might enter into contact. Each artist approaches this relational dynamic through distinct positions, methods and techniques.
For Irene Grau, her own body is the medium through which she enters into dialogue with the natural landscape – traversing it, inhabiting it, drawing on it as raw material for a coherent artistic practice. Her works are often the outcome of performative actions: not simply traces or records of these processes, but systems in which natural matter becomes a vocabulary in conversation with the history of painting and landscape. In Marco Giordano’s practice, the body is never displayed but always implied. His work begins with word, sound and material, reassembling them into an intrinsically performative sculptural language, and frequently involves the recomposition and transformation of matter as an act that interrogates contemporary social phenomena – and the political frictions they reveal.
Te llamo cuerpo brings together existing works by both artists alongside new productions made specifically for the museum’s spaces, spanning painting, photography, sculpture and installation.
Irene Grau presents a selection of works from two series: brillo abrigo (2024) and A hierro (2023–2024). In the latter, Grau works outward from her own body towards nature, etching and staining canvases with rust and water. She uses physical force to drag the fabrics across the ground, turning grass into countless brushes that mark the surface – capturing the labour of miners at work. All that force is held in the surface of the work, alongside the delicacy of water. The landscape paints itself. Abrigo was made in the surroundings of Altamira and is rooted in two essential questions: the presence of water through movement, and the possibility of understanding oneself as a place of shelter. These series will be accompanied by a new production made from the dust generated in the manufacture of ceramic tiles in the Castellón area.
Marco Giordano constructs a new ecosystem by bringing different bodies of work into dialogue, with the large-scale sculptural installation Gridlocks (2026) as its centrepiece. These sculptures are composed of assemblages of aluminium, copper, fibreglass and plastic – the materials of energy infrastructure, bodies that are often invisible within our cities. Made from cabling salvaged during dismantling works in Glasgow, this series marks the first stage of a long-term inquiry into energy transition and the systems of production and extraction that underpin it.
Co-production:
