Exhibitions
Marina Núñez and the enigma of a planet that we also are
Some journeys are not about reaching an unknown territory, but about understanding that what we seek outside ourselves is also part of us. Marina Núñez's "Journey to the Center of the Earth" takes this idea as its starting point, venturing into a universe where science, imagination, and artistic creation converge. The exhibition, presented at the Extremadura and Ibero-American Museum of Contemporary Art (MEIAC) in Badajoz, invites us to question the boundaries between living beings, the mineral world, technology, and the cosmos.
From Athanasius Kircher's subterranean visions, published in 1665, to Jules Verne's 1864 novel, the Earth's interior has fueled a long tradition of stories, hypotheses, and representations. Beneath the Earth's surface, both the desire for knowledge and the fascination with what remains hidden have been projected. Marina Núñez revisits this imagery to offer a contemporary reflection on our relationship with the planet and the forces that shape its transformation.
The artist has developed a career marked by questioning the limits of the body, identity, and ways of life. Her works, populated by hybrid figures, mutating anatomies, and scenarios where the organic coexists with the technological, destabilize the categories with which we usually interpret reality. In her visual universes, the body ceases to be a closed structure and becomes a permeable space, subject to transformations and connected to other materials and organisms. This conception is fundamental to understanding a proposal that shifts the human being from the center of attention and places them within a network of interdependencies.
In dialogue with explorers, scientists, and writers, Núñez's series function as instruments for approaching the world. His images do not aim to offer definitive answers, but rather to raise questions, introduce variations, and reveal unexpected relationships between the living, the mineral, the artificial, and the cosmic. Imagination thus emerges as a tool for expanding the boundaries of knowledge and exploring other ways of understanding the processes that shape existence.
The journey proposed by the exhibition is therefore not limited to a geological exploration. It is also an inquiry into the continuity between organisms and their environment, into the matter we share, and into the processes of transformation that the planet undergoes. The Earth ceases to be presented as a stage external to human experience and reveals itself as a dynamic system in which matter, energy, time, and life forms converge.
Curated by Isabel Durán, Journey to the Center of the Earth invites us to reconsider our position as observers. We do not contemplate the planet from an absolute distance, but from within a web of relationships that precedes and sustains us. This shift in perspective is one of the keys to Marina Núñez's work: questioning human exceptionalism in order to imagine a reality where the boundaries between nature and artifice, individual and environment, matter and life become unstable.
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