Beaten Earth. Writings of Composting
Beaten Earth. Writings of Composting
September 19, 2025 to January 4, 2026
Atrio. Curated by: Fran Estepa
ARTISTS
Antonio Rodríguez Luna, Belén Rodríguez, ChonÍn Navarro, Daido Moriyama, Evru / Zush, Francesc Torres, Irene Infantes, Isabel Villar, Joan Fontcuberta, Pere Formiguera, José Guerrero, Jorge Yeregui, Leandro Katz, Lotty Rosenfeld, Maria Thereza Alves, Mercedes Pimiento,Moreno & Grau, Pepe Espaliú, Valie Export, Xavier Ribas, Yeni y Nan
An exhibition is not a monument: it is disturbed ground, a beaten earth. Not a clean stratum where ordered layers accumulate, but a space where time, debris, remnants, and stories intersect. It is not about displaying artworks, but about activating a site, a place for excavation, not to find an origin, but to enter a network of signs, traces, and connections.
Like that ruinous building Robert Smithson photographed and described as if it were a Mayan temple (Hotel Palenque), the works in this exhibition are understood as unstable structures, in a state of perpetual construction and collapse. Ways of thinking history not as a closed sequence, but as a negentropic process. What matters is not what is found, but how what remains in ruin reveals a different way of thinking about time, matter, and epistemologies.
Beaten Earth is a contested site built around the symbolic coexistence with Kapwani Kiwanga¿s installation The Worlds We Tell: Threshold, which remains in the same space as a constant vibration. Inspired by a Bantu cosmology, her structure of wood, stone, pigment, and metal confront us with an urgen question: which stories gain access to the shared space, and which are expelled? Her arquitecture does not delimit, it invites crossing. It reminds us that every history is partial and situated, and that every archive is political.
This exhibition proposes reading the CAAC¿s collection as a living site: a telluric archive where layers do not simply stack but contaminate, mix, and clash. A palimpsest in fermentation. There are no intact objects, only remains, marks, residues. Each work is an artifact that carries memory while simultaneously revoking it, redrawing it, allowing it to mutate. Through works by artists such as Belén Rodríguez, Valie Export, Mercedes Pimiento, Jorge Yeregui, José Guerrero, Maria Thereza Alves and Isabel Villar, this exhibition does not offer a retrospective gaze, but a proposition: to compost memory, to till the earth so that something might grow.
Image gallery
