RADAR

Earth’s Navel 

brings together artists who work from an intimate relationship with organic and textile matter, the land, and the knowledge passed down from generation to generation. The proposal is rooted in the idea of the earth as a living body, an archive, and a source of knowledge: a place where the spiritual, the political, and the poetic converge. The “navel” evokes a point of origin—a connection between body and land, a site of nourishment and vital transmission—an image that can also be applied to threads, weavings, and manual gestures. Textile practice, understood as a symbolic extension of the earth, shares with it the condition of being a living fabric, a bearer of memory and relation. From this shared image, the section seeks to open a space for dialogue between practices that overflow the boundaries of contemporary art, reclaiming ways of making and forms of knowledge that were long silenced, marginalized, or undervalued.

The works gathered here challenge the divisions between art and craft, between creation and care, between knowledge and making. From different geographies and genealogies, the invited artists place ancestral and traditional knowledge at the center, asserting its symbolic, intellectual, and critical force. In all of them, the body, the landscape, and matter—textile, organic, pictorial, or ceramic—appear as places of memory and resistance: territories where gestures, rhythms, and collective learnings are woven together, preserved primarily by women.

Within this framework, the participating artists propose distinct yet deeply resonant approaches. Sandra Monterroso, drawing from her Maya Q’eqchi’ heritage, works with organic materials, rituals, and actions that reactivate the memory of Indigenous peoples and their spiritual and political relationship with the land. Sonia Navarro explores textile languages and sewing and embroidery techniques as vehicles of cultural and affective knowledge, rereading craft traditions to expand the field of the political and the symbolic. Paloma de la Cruz, in turn, combines her research on traditional architecture and design with manual knowledge historically associated with the feminine, generating pieces that fuse ceramics and textiles into a dialogue between structure, ornament, body, and matter—transforming notions of the domestic, the spiritual, and the performative.

This constellation expands with Renan Teles and Uýra, who broaden the material field of the section through photography and painting—not as “media” separated from the earth, but as other ways of working with the living archive of what is seen, named, and silenced. Through their biographies and practices, they position the body—racialized, queer, strained by stigma or exoticization—as a territory of dispute and belonging. In Uýra, performance and photo-performance articulate scientific and ancestral knowledge to contemplate the contrast between forest and city, Indigenous diaspora, and the cycles of disappearance and resurgence of life. In Renan Teles, the intersection between photography and painting activates a critical investigation into the representation of Black and Afro-Indigenous bodies and their historical imaginaries, shifting identity from the realm of the fixed to that of the constructed. In both cases, the works bring to the section a register in which the landscape—natural and built—is also skin, and where the “archive” becomes embodied experience.

Through their works, these artists return to the hands—and the bodies—that transform earth, fiber, matter, and images their central role in constructing memory, knowledge, and the collective imagination capable of generating other possible futures.

Isabella Lenzi

Participaiting galleries

T20 - Murcia, Spain / Madrid, Spain
Artist: Sonia Navarro

Proyecto H - Mexico City, Mexico
Artist: Paloma de la Cruz

Fernando Pradilla - Madrid, Spain
Artist: Sandra Monterroso

Aura Galeria - São Paulo, Brazil
Artists: UÝRA and Renan Teles