Exhibitions
LALIRIO: Fuentesal Arenillas activate the textile and architectural memory of La Fabra
The Barcelona facility inaugurates a new exhibition stage with LALIRIO, the proposal of the Fuentesal Arenillas duo under the curatorship of Claudia Elies.
LALIRIO is exhibited at La Fabra Contemporary Art Centre under the curatorship of the space's new director, Claudia Elies. The proposal presents the artistic research of the duo Fuentesal Arenillas, formed by Julia Fuentesal (Huelva, 1986) and Pablo Arenillas (Cádiz, 1989), and offers an approach to their practice through a set of pieces that interact with the architecture of the place, as well as with its industrial and textile-related memory.
The exhibition brings together a diverse set of works, some from previous periods and others conceived specifically for this presentation, which offer an extensive and nuanced vision of the artistic couple's trajectory and work processes. This corpus unfolds a sustained investigation around space, the body and material memory, and maintains a direct link with the environment that hosts it. The pieces not only establish a subtle dialogue with the architecture of La Fabra, but also reactivate its industrial and textile past, incorporating it as a fundamental part of the exhibition narrative and its symbolic charge.
The exhibition is organized around a large central structure formed by an accumulation of textile pieces that extend and are inserted between pillars and windows, generating a kind of backbone that visually articulates the public's journey. This spatial device functions as a living organism that breathes with the building and that puts the relationship between object and architecture into tension. The works that make up it are the result of a shared creative process and a collective learning that occurs in the encounter and exchange with other artistic agents. Thus, projects such as Carrusel , developed in collaboration with Itziar Okariz, or Imaginaria , carried out with LUCE, exemplify an open and relational methodology that turns Fuentesal Arenillas' practice into a space of cooperation, experimentation and mutual knowledge.
His sculptural research by Fuentesal Arenillas is built on the notion of duplication and the logic of play, exploring the capacity of materials to generate meanings that transcend their physical nature. This approach activates multiple symbolic and linguistic readings, which intervene both in the material dimension of the work and in its cultural and interpretative context.
Carrusel, Imaginaria and Caracolas form this tour of the exhibition at La Fabra Centre d'Art Contempmorani in Barcelona. The exhibition is divided into two different levels. On the ground floor, Carrusel is presented, initially shown in 2024 at the Centro de Cultura Contemporánea Condeduque in Madrid and produced thanks to the Suport a la Creación Producció 2024 program of the ”la Caixa” Foundation, with the collaboration of the Ayudas a la creación contemporánea and la movilidad nacional e internacional of the Madrid City Council and the Blueproject Foundation. On the upper floor, Imaginaria and Caracolas are exhibited, which combine existing pieces with productions made expressly for this occasion.
In the three installations, an elastic tension is detected that functions as a common thread, persistently returning to an intimate setting of movements and choreographies where necks and waists, wrists and feet meet and deviate. These are narrative systems that do not advance in a straight line, but are woven through ramifications, intersections and superpositions, generating a universe of stories in constant transformation.
