Generations 2026: a quarter of a century of transits

Madrid,

Last year, Generations celebrated a quarter of a century, the La Casa Encendida call aimed at promoting the work of young artists and giving them tools to produce and disseminate their work. In this new chapter of the initiative, the winners have not been eight, but six, with the aim of increasing the amount of their prizes (now 10,000 euros for production and 2,000 as fees) and also the space in which to show the proposals.

This year the jury that selected the participating authors under 35 years of age was made up of David Barro, director of Es Baluard Museu; Rosa Ferré, co-director of TBA21; and Commissioner Maria Willis. Long-term projects are recognized, not necessarily completed – so that the same jury can learn about their processes – and usually of very different nature; On this occasion, the definition that Ferré makes of one of them, that of Víctor Colomer, is extended to all the chosen pieces: a sculpture that ceases to be a mere object and becomes a relational system that modifies the ways of living, perceiving and moving.

Body, matter, time and voice are the center of the research of these creators, who, like so many of their generation, care more about the paths than their fruits and are not concerned about defining themselves by one discipline or another: they usually combine sculpture and installation, performative and sound practices, developments in time and space. They are interested in what is transformed and what is unstable, what they believe is necessary to rethink.

Just a couple of weeks ago, Hodei Herreros joined our recruits, with whom the journey begins. She uses shadows, silhouettes and contours, of flatness, to build sculptural forms and incorporates and claims feminine makeup and jewelry as part of her work, questioning that structure and ornament, politics and aesthetics, cannot converge.

In La Casa he teaches us The Voiceless Voice of the Girlsan installation between sound and space: a structure painted with makeup will host the bodies, and the mouths at different heights, of women who will emit their voices in a performance intended to reflect on which are audible and which are silenced. This instrument of the voice is also present in cups like lips, open: Herreros remembers that speech and appearance have been and are the object of controls and disciplines.

Generations 2026. La Casa Encendida. Photography: Maru Herrero

The aforementioned Ruiz Colomer is interested in the caller make space: how social organizational structures are maintained and destroyed and what frictions they generate; and addresses these questions from sculpture, an unusual one. It uses prototypes and mockups, devices that are always tests but that, at the same time, can be released at any time to become final pieces.

In Generations we will see two of these devices linked to psychiatric sanatoriums; We will have the opportunity to link their architecture and its elements linked to containment (doors, windows, frames) with the thought disorders suffered by those who live there. For this author, space is a field of relationships between the body, matter and language.

Colomer and Herreros share a room with another of our recruits, Maya Pita-Romero, who has been using installations, sculptures and texts to link the processes of our body and the transformations of ecosystems. This Madrid artist imagines scenarios where other relationships can take place with the traditional activities of the past and with nature itself, relationships that will have to be far from asepsis and open to metamorphoses and the conjunction, perhaps, of the beautiful and the abject.

Without ever reaching the mouth is the title of her proposal here: a kind of tunnel through which we can walk, made with soft materials (textiles, plants, latex), which she sews, weaves and assembles. It is a space to hide, or an intimate architecture; of a place to suffocate or to be repaired that Pita-Romero devised by imagining herself swallowed by her own throat.

Élan d’Orphium, Víctor Santamarina and Claudia Pagés are waiting for us in the second room of the exhibition. The first corresponds to the most eschatological piece in the tour: act of love. For María Wills, she delves into a politics of pleasure and claims that the soft and the ephemeral can also build.

This author from Badajoz has converted his own urine (according to him, golden shower) in sculptural forms similar to birds, in a gesture that he wants to translate as a sign of alternative surrender, because it entails bodily discipline and prolonged emotional involvement.

For Víctor Santamarina, sculpture may not be conceived to last, but rather to embody collapse and evolution, ontologically and materially. In Subsidence He has used formwork systems, in wax and vertically, to activate a choreography of wear and tear of that element, which will dismantle over the time of the exhibition, collapsing as the days go by.

Subsidence is, precisely, a geological phenomenon consisting of the sinking of land; In Santamarina’s creations, it is the structures designed to be solid that become fragile, with what this movement implies in symbolism. We can understand this composition as a performative sculpture in which everything starts, and does not end, with failure. The lost wax It will then be collected and reused.

Finally, Claudia Pagés is another of the artists who combines visual creation with writing and performance: her videographic installations, works on paper and books draw from her use of words, music and the body.

His award-winning work is called Watermarks: Towers, castles, dogs and Laia It is nourished by its studies on the watermarks of paper (or watermarks), those drawings that were carried out in the manufacturing process of the sheets, were integrated into them and can only be seen against the light.

In the Middle Ages, and later times, they indicated origin and authenticity, with those of the title of this piece predominating as motifs. Pagés has chosen to project with a laser, which if it lasted longer and the images did not alternate, could pierce the wall, some of the marks that are preserved in the Molí Paperer Museum in Capellades. Decontextualized, they no longer admit stable readings, as proven by her niece’s denial of the themes.