Curator Isabella Lenzi
Earth’s Navel brings together artists who work from an intimate relationship with organic and textile materials, the land, and knowledge passed down from generation to generation.
The proposal begins with 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, of connection between body and land, of nourishment and vital transmission—a metaphor that can also be applied to threads, weaves, and manual gestures. Textiles, understood as a symbolic extension of the earth, share with it the condition of being a living fabric, a bearer of memory and relation. From this common image, the section seeks to open a space for dialogue among practices that overflow the boundaries of contemporary art, recovering ways of making and thinking that for a long time were silenced, marginalized, or undervalued.
The works gathered here question the divisions between art and craft, between creation and care, between knowing and making. From different geographies and genealogies, the participating artists bring ancestral and traditional knowledge to the center, reclaiming its symbolic, intellectual, and critical force. In all of them, the body, the landscape, and materiality—textile, organic, or ceramic—appear as sites of memory and resistance: territories where gestures, rhythms, and collective learnings are interwoven, preserved above all 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 artisanal traditions to expand the political and symbolic field. Paloma de la Cruz, in turn, combines her research on traditional architecture and design with manual knowledge historically associated with the feminine, creating ceramic–textile pieces that generate a dialogue between structure, ornament, body, and material, transforming notions of the domestic, the spiritual, and the performative.
Through their works, these artists restore to the hands that transform earth and thread their central role in the construction of memory, knowledge, and collective imagination.
Isabella Lenzi
Galerías Participantes
T20 - Murcia, Spain / Madrid, Spain
Artista: Sonia Navarro
Proyecto H - Mexico City, Mexico
Artista: Paloma de la Cruz
Fernando Pradilla - Madrid, Spain
Artista: Sandra Monterroso
Isabella Lenzi (1986, São Paulo, Brazil)
Lives in Madrid.
She is currently Visual Arts Curator at the Círculo de Bellas Artes in Madrid, as well as Artistic Director and Chief Curator of the Alberto Cruz Foundation in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. Until the end of 2023, she was a curator and researcher in the Collections Department of the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, where she took part in the project to reorganize the museum’s permanent collection. Previously, she worked as Curator of Visual Arts at Fundación Mapfre in Madrid.
In Brazil, she directed for seven years the cultural center of the Instituto Camões / Consulate General of Portugal in São Paulo, which she consolidated as a place for debate and experimentation, with a program of exhibitions, film cycles, public programs, and the publication of artist books and catalogues. The aim was to work in a situated way—mapping, supporting, and disseminating Portuguese cultural production by emerging and historical artists and thinkers—through a dialogue with the Brazilian and local context, adopting an approach that revisits the shared colonial past and present of both countries.
Since 2016, she has lived between Latin America and Europe. In Latin America, she was also part of the curatorial, public programs, and residency team at Videobrasil, a cultural association dedicated to mapping and disseminating art from the geopolitical South. She worked on the programming and coordination of two editions of the SESC_Videobrasil International Festival (now the SESC_Videobrasil Biennial). Previously, she worked in curatorial and exhibition coordination at Galeria Vermelho in São Paulo, and served as assistant curator of the 11th Cuenca Biennial in Ecuador.
In the United Kingdom, she worked in the curatorial department of the Whitechapel Gallery in London, where she coordinated the Neon Curatorial Exchange residency program between London and Athens, as well as exhibitions for the Exhibitions Archive Department. She has also collaborated on several European projects at institutions such as the Nouveau Musée National de Monaco and PAC – Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea in Milan.
As an independent curator, she has curated projects at various Spanish institutions such as the Museo Reina Sofía, La Virreina Centre de la Imatge in Barcelona, the Círculo de Bellas Artes, La Casa Encendida, and the Sala de Arte Joven of the Community of Madrid, with a special focus on establishing spaces for dialogue and co-creation with the local fabric through transversal, collective, and collaborative proposals. She is currently preparing curatorial projects for the Centre del Carme de Cultura Contemporània in Valencia and MUCAC – Museo Centro de Arte Contemporáneo in Málaga.
She is an architect and urban planner trained at the Universidade de São Paulo and the Universidade do Porto (Portugal), with a specialization in Art History. She holds a Master’s in Photography and Visual Culture from Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, a Master’s in Museum Studies from University College London (UCL), and an MRes in Museology from the Universidade de São Paulo.