Mireia Molina Costa. Visibility Under 1 km

What does the gaze tell us when it no longer clearly distinguishes what it finds in front of it? Mist and darkness erase the contours and alter our habitual way of perceiving our surroundings. For Antoni Tàpies, looking is an exercise that makes it possible to broaden knowledge and discover what we have not noticed. Yet when visibility is diminished, how might we orientate ourselves?

This question resonates in two Tàpies works found at the museum: Mitjó [Sock], on the terrace, and Núvol i cadira [Cloud and Chair], on the façade. The tangled threads inside the sock echo the dense, metallic web of the cloud. In both works of art, the irregular workings of these materials blur any outlines and call on us to look beyond recognisable shapes, searching for what remains partially hidden.

In Visibility Under 1 km, Mireia Molina Costa explores lack of visibility as a condition with its own identity, able to give rise to other forms of perception and knowledge. In the context of Following the Sun, the artist contrasts sunlight and hegemonic systems that order, measure and map the world, with a “lunar system of orientation”, where half-light, drowsiness and disorientation make it possible to explore other ways of inhabiting the world. Perhaps it is not a question of finding a new north, but of learning to guide oneself without having all the answers.

The proposal takes the form of a sound experience set partway between reading, poetical exercises and lullabies. Using voice and a screen, Molina Costa invites us to relax our gaze and enter into an intermediary state between wakefulness and sleep. An invitation to suspend the need to see clearly, and thus explore what might arise when we let ourselves be guided by other senses.

Visibility Inferior to 1 km has the support of the Beques FAR 2026 grants for artistic creation, research and innovation of the Government of Catalonia.

Mireia Molina Costa (Barcelona, 1997) is interested in language as an ecological, affective and ritual material, in its oral, written as well as non-verbal and inintelligible forms of transmission. Her practice moves principally through writing, singing and sound-making, as well as auditive, editorial and curatorial processes. She has shown her sound work at MACBA, Arts Santa Mònica, Hangar, ESMUC (Gender Sounds IV), La Caldera (Art Jove Creació award), Fundació Miró and CACiS – El Forn de la Calç (with cossos d’aigua collective, 2024), among others. She is currently a research resident at La Escocesa, while from 2022 to 2025 she worked as an editor at einaidea, where she continues to participate as an external collaborator.

Activity programmed as part of the Museu Tàpies series Following the Sun, entitled Uncovering the Gaze, curated by Carolina Ciuti.

[Image: ama ara l’eco nua, sound performance, 2024. Part of the collective exhibition Un paisatge reverberant, laberíntic, fangós, dens i estrellat a cura d’amor rumor, Sala d’Art Jove i La Caldera. Photo: Irene Royo]