blanca arias: At the Edge of a Forest, a Girl

‘At the edge of a forest, a girl.’ There is a promise, from teller to listener, concealed in that opening, like a note tucked into a pocket, a hint that something is about to happen. Anyone in the vicinity would turn their head and prick their ears, their mind already forming a picture of the girl, perhaps picking her way through trees or standing beside the green wall of a forest.

Excerpt from Hamnet, by Maggie O’Farrell

It is with this horizon of expectation that At the Edge of a Forest, a Girl unfolds. Taking the apparent voids in Antoni Tàpies’ Mitjó [Sock] as her starting point, blanca arias invites us to inhabit the hole as an ambiguous space: absence and openness, vulnerability and possibility. That which decorum usually casts aside — excess, the abject, deviation from the norm — becomes here a place for rethinking the perception of bodies and what our gaze says about us.

In this context, body and matter are presented as surfaces for writing, conveying what words cannot express. As an act of methodological care, arias ‘pulls the thread’, symbolically linking textile practices, oral memory and discreet genealogies that are often left out of the official narrative.

From a feminist perspective, intuition and listening to the soft areas of the body are claimed here as forms of knowledge. Poetry, conceived as a fold in language, opens up spaces where other meanings emerge and allows us to question what we expect from the artistic experience today.

Activity held as part of the 2026 edition of the “Following the Sun” serie at the Museu Tàpies.

blanca arias (she/they) is an artist-researcher, educator and curator. She holds a degree in Art History from the University of Barcelona and a master’s degree in Comparative Studies from the Universitat Pompeu Fabra. She develops her practice in the field of image, from where she fabulates about possible lesbian feminist gestures and materialities. Blandito blandito. ¿Qué le hacemos las feministas al arte? (Cielo Santo, 2025) is her first book.

She is currently a member of the Public and Social Programming Department at the Fundació Miró, as well as an educator at MACBA and a volunteer at the Ca la Dona archive. She has curated exhibitions at the CCCB (2026), Fundació Miró (2025), Sala d’Art Jove (2024) and La Panera (2024), and has also carried out art mediation activities at Matadero, MNAC, La Capella, MACBA, Monestir de Pedralbes and the Centre LGBTI, among others. As an artist, her work has been recognised with grants from Barcelona Crea (2024) and Sala d’Art Jove (2023), and has been exhibited in spaces such as the EACC (Espai d’Art Contemporani de Castelló), Loop Festival and Tabakalera.