Alvaro Aroca “Seeing through Embrace” 28.03-26.04.2025

Seeing through Embrace

Alvaro Aroca

28.03 – 26.04.2025

Opening Friday 28 March 5-7 PM

© Alvaro Aroca

“Seeing through Embrace”. Memories of the Body and Absent Nature

In a profound and visceral gesture, Álvaro Aroca Córdova invites us to explore the intersection between the timeless body, symbolic memory, and sensitive territory. Through a poetic and permeable language, this exhibition articulates a reflection on the connection with the environment and its contours, blurring the boundaries between the human and the non-human.

The work emerges from a deeply embodied feeling, where the body becomes a mirror of fears, prejudices, desires, and of nature as a space where our essential connection with the environment is redefined. This body, understood as a carnal territory, transforms into a sensitive cartography that reconstructs forgotten natural memories. From a decolonial perspective, Aroca challenges us to question center-periphery dynamics, revealing how dark peripheries not only harbor resistance but also contain a vital memory that sustains the glow of the center.

© Alvaro Aroca

The exhibition raises urgent questions: How can we perceive what is no longer there? How can we project absent nature into the present? What does it mean to inhabit absence and embrace the shadow? Aroca proposes a dialogue between loss, memory, and regeneration, exploring how nature and the body interact as symbiotic reflections. On this journey, the artist creates a space where mutilated ecosystems and erased memories find a voice through rituals of emotional reconstruction.

In Donna J. Haraway’s words, “nothing in the world is one; nothing is connected to everything, but everything is connected to something.” This quote illuminates Aroca’s proposal, who, through corporeal transformation and eco-language, builds a bridge between “cartographic beings” —symbolic presences emerging from the shadows to inhabit forgotten territories— and the dynamics of loss and regeneration. In this process, the act of remembering becomes a ritual action that redefines oblivion and reconfigures the absent into a new sensorial order.

Through photography, textiles, and performative actions, the exhibition invites us to rethink oblivion as a tool to inhabit the void and reconstruct the present. Aroca calls us to “see with embrace,” to look inward and feel part of what is missing, and to imagine new sensitive cartographies where the natural and the human intertwine in a gesture of healing and resistance.

© Alvaro Aroca