FUGA Gallery, Barcelona

AGAINST THE HORIZON’S GRAMMAR

This booth brings together two Latin American artists based in Barcelona: Agustina Fioretti, from Argentina, and Valentina Alvarado Matos, from Venezuela. Their practices meet through diaspora, the sea, and the inherited systems that have taught us how to read distance, territory, bodies, and origin.

Here, the horizon is not neutral. It appears as a colonial grammar: a line that orders vision, travel, knowledge, and possession. Valentina Alvarado Matos’s ceramic fragments from no termina de aorillarse resist this ordering through a logic of singularity, where each piece belongs to a constellation without surrendering its difference. In el mar peinó la orilla, the artist traces the Atlantic horizon with a finger, turning analog film into a counter-image and a gesture of reassignment. The nearby light boxes, made from physical film cuts of exoticized flora, further question who records the Global South, who consumes it, and who authorizes its visibility.

Before this moving horizon, Agustina Fioretti’s ceramic Plate, from Cruzando la línea, invokes the Equator-crossing rituals of transatlantic voyages, where Neptune, masculinity, stereotype, and initiation emerge as unstable colonial fictions. Its iron rod cuts across Alvarado Matos’s image, materially interrupting the horizon it confronts.

Fioretti’s blind-embossed texts and works from Bayos negros dormidos extend this disturbance through songs, amulets, horsehair, feathers, gloves, and construction materials that become hybrid beings that evade taxonomy. Together, both artists unsettle inherited classifications and imagine forms of memory, matter, and belonging that cross the line without obeying it.