Santander,
On November 15, a new edition of Itineraries will begin at the Botín Center, the exhibition that annually collects the projects of the artists who win the Botín Foundation’s scholarships for creators. This is one of the most open and flexible calls among those organized in our country: authors of any age and origin can attend with proposals on all topics, so that these exhibitions can encourage exchange between languages, contexts and generations.
In 2023, the edition to which this exhibition corresponds, Javier Bravo de Rueda, Noa and Lara Castro Lema, Diego Delas, Gelen Jeleton, Nader Koochaki and Eduardo Navarro obtained the scholarships, selected by a jury composed of curators Irene Aristizábal and Filipa Ramos and artists Juan López and Jorge Satorre. His works now in Santander, produced during the nine months of these grants, have in common their exploration of the links between nature, memory and forms of non-rational knowledge, and their approach, from an affective and symbolic point of view, to landscapes – be they marine, desert or floral -, articulating modes of attention and contemplation that usually call into question the hierarchies between the human and the non-human.
Peruvian Javier Bravo has studied the origin and imagery of Ica stones and their possibilities to help us understand the ways in which material culture, fiction and historical narratives complement each other.
These are engraved oval stones that were found in the sixties in certain areas of the Ocucaje desert and that, it was thought, could be millions of years old; According to the readings of some, it even contains indications that an ancient and alien civilization populated our planet. This was believed until Basilio Uschuya, a local farmer, admitted having created them, but they continue to arouse interest, standing on the border between myth, science and speculation.
The installation They saw something in the sky: Ufolatries and desert It has multiple pieces (records, artifacts, cartoons, murals, sculptures and sound), because it takes us to the Dr. Cabrera Scientific Museum of Ica, dedicated to stones, their official history and their alternative narratives. It does not offer answers, rather it proposes us to speculate.
The twins from A Coruña, Noa and Lara Castro, draw in their projects from their family’s stories, linked to the Costa de la Muerte. With them they have created a musical story whose starting point is the Gran Sol, a fishing ground in the North Atlantic where their grandfather Nelson spent most of his life working as a fisherman.
These fishing grounds were originally called in French “Grande Sole”, which means ‘large sole’, but the phonetic translation from French to Galician relates the sun and that fish, generating for these artists the possibility of a performative game. The result is materialized in performances and public events: factual stories, narratives, mythology, song composition, performance, costume and video designs; Family, friends, neighbors and the duo participate.
At the Botín Center they are condensed into Dine little sunsa film that shows that intimacy may not just be a private matter, but a porous zone of communality, a collective construction between siblings, species, neighbors, places, technologies, and the natural world. It starts from life and memory, and emphasizes how the human and the non-human are connected by violence, care, work and death.
Diego Delas from Burgos, for his part, has been analyzing the links between artistic practice and popular art, considering a personal seduction for the crafts. His speech, memory is part of the project Telesmawhich investigates the links between contemporary creation and more widespread devotional practices, such as the creation of votive objects, talismans and amulets. It is a spatial intervention composed of large fabrics suspended in the air, evocative of monumental amulets. The exhibition space is thus converted into an enveloping environment, in which the materials and shapes refer to a great collective talisman. These works combine two traditions: popular goldsmithing, through brass sheets similar to traditional jewelry settings, and gestural painting, with strokes inspired by marks and signs of artisanal trades.
The center of the exhibition is occupied precisely by a textile that holds seven giant amulets, chained together; each combines materials, words and cultural fragments. This work highlights the differences between the votive object, which looks towards the past as gratitude, and the amulet, which contemplates the future as a promise or protection. The center of this proposal is the reflection on the power of images and objects, and on their ability to merge with the spiritual and the material, to protect and beautify at the same time.
Political history of flowers: Hanami (see the flower) It is the work of Gelen Jeleton from Murcia. It is based on a poetic investigation into the ritual cultures of nature based on that habit of hanamithe Japanese custom of gathering to watch the cherry blossoms.
Jeleton traveled to Japan to live this experience in parks and temples, and to examine its representations in museums, fabrics and everyday objects, transferring what he contemplated to drawing, installation and animation. The result is a meditation on transience, ritual repetition and the politics of the gaze.
His installation at the Botín Center will feature drawings on tissue paper, a series of animations and layers of printed tissue paper that fall from the walls, spread across the floor and hang from the space, representing the flower of Sakura (from the Japanese cherry tree) during the hanamihe yozakura (cherry trees at night) and the hanafubuki (rain of petals) and its memory. The preparation of the drawings in itself was very much a meditative act and repetition.
These works are part of a longer project by the author: Political history of flowers (2014-2025), in which he invites us to stop, to slow down in order to “see the flower”, with all the pleasure and magic that the act has.
The Basque artist Nader Koochaki, meanwhile, has developed three lines of research in León over the last twelve years, all in relation to the physical and symbolic legacy of mining. In his project for this scholarship he focused on the figure of Salvador Robles Aibar (1957–2009), a bulldozer operator who installed sets of peculiar rocks in restored areas of Corta Pastora.
Koochaki has investigated the intention of these interventions and their interpretations from art or the industrial landscape, suggesting debates about the limits between artistic creation, everyday gesture and material memory. His work has combined field research with scientific collaboration, especially through geological and biological studies.
The author has reconstructed fragments of Robles’ life through interviews with family members and former colleagues, facing silences and archives that are difficult to access, institutional and family. It emphasizes that mining history is marked by loss, trauma and the control of memory by institutions and that this activity affected many areas of life, beyond the economy.
Finally, the Argentine Eduardo Navarro will exhibit at the Botín Center FOCA (Oceanic Foundation of Loving Contemplation). His interests lie in the functioning of the mind and its links with nature and the cosmos and in the ways in which perception mediates reality through the senses.
After working as a volunteer, during the pandemic, in the rehabilitation of orphaned sea lion pups to facilitate their return to nature, he launched an official foundation focused on inviting artists to create works of art from the internal perception of what it means to transform into an oceanic entity.
In Santander we will see a seal suit, a film that documents the encounter with sea lions and a series of drawings that investigate the physical motor skills of these animals. The project proposes an invitation to another way of life, to experiment with different ways of relating to oneself and others.
Coinciding with this anniversary of Itinerarios, on November 15 the Botín Center will host a series of round tables in which members of the juries and artists who have been part of the history of these scholarships will participate.
“XXX Itineraries”
LOOT CENTER
Plaza Emilio Botín, s/n
Pereda Gardens
Santander
From November 15, 2025 to April 19, 2026
