PERFORMANCE: ESE ENTORNO ENDURECE MI PIEL. BY RA ASENSI
Feb 21, 2025
art madrid
RAÍCES AFUERA. PERFORMANCE CYCLE X ART MADRID'25
Art Madrid celebrates twenty years of contemporary art from March 5 to 9, 2025, at the Galería de Cristal of the Palacio de Cibeles. During Art Week, it becomes an exhibition platform for national and international galleries and artists. In this edition, with the aim of providing a space for artists working in the realm of performance art, the fair presents Raíces Afuera, a performance cycle that explores notions of belonging and the need for rootedness in a contemporary world marked by fragmentation, displacement, and disconnection. Positioned within the fair as a critical and reflective space, the project challenges the individual’s relationship with their environment, community, and sense of identity.
PERFORMANCE: ESE ENTORNO ENDURECE MI PIEL. BY RA ASENSI
March 8 | 19:00h. Galería de Cristal of the Palacio de Cibeles.
Ese entorno endurece mi piel is a performance that takes place through sculptural pieces made of oxidized corten steel and seawater. These bodily extensions function as second skins. They are activated through touch, generating sounds. Together, they form a kind of poetic cartography. These pieces have been created from the imprints of various watery bodies, and through this process, they transform into maps of water.
"Life began in the sea, and our bodies have been engaged in various narratives about this origin story ever since. I am not interested in narratives that place 'the family' in its traditional role, but the ones about kinship in all its wonderful queer forms are still something I seek. That is the difficulty: to embrace queer narratives as a territory of connection and responsibility without reinstalling the old myths of dark continents, woman as matrix, and other power games of familial bonds." Astrida Neimanis
ABOUT RA ASENSI
Ra Asensi (Bilbao, 1989) creates artifacts as ways of (ex)tending the material limits of the body. This production is influenced by ceramics and its processes, performance art, photography, and sculpture.
Notable solo exhibitions include Objeto Inquieto at Fundación Bilbaoarte Fundazioa, Inadaptada Resistencia at Centro Cultural Montehermoso, and La lava que llevas contigo at TACA (Palma de Mallorca).
Ra Asensi’s work focuses on the creation of artifacts as a means to expand the material boundaries of the body and initiate collaborative processes. Their production is influenced by ceramics and its techniques, performance art, photography, and sculpture. Through their practice, they explore the relationships between body(s), technology(s), and nature(s), investigating how these elements interact and transform in different contexts.
Their works, interventions, and actions take place in various environments: Galería Fran Reus, 2024 (Palma de Mallorca); Art House Foundation Studio D, 2024 (London); 019-Ghent, 2024 (Ghent); Tabakalera, 2024 (Donosti); Colonia Industrial Cal Rosal, 2024 (Berga, Catalunya); Festival Mercurio/Instituto Cervantes, 2023 (Palermo); ECOS, 2023 (Sala Rekalde, Bilbao); BAP, 2022 (Guggenheim Museum Bilbao).
