Elena del Rivero. Transiting “La Quema”

Elena del Rivero is the artist invited to participate in the project Extramurs [Extramural], 2025, curated by Mateo Feijóo. This project is the result of intense collaborative research and production focused on the burning of her early works as an act of healing. Thus, this edition explores the connections between historical and personal memory, intercity narratives in dialogue with the surroundings and contemporary artistic practices, highlighting, once again, the potential of art as a vehicle for critical reflection and social change.

Transiting “La Quema” is based on an initial action, La Quema [The Burning], carried out in the Galician region of A Baixa Límia, as part of an initiative of A Casa do Pozo. The process was documented through images and sound recordings that have played a key role in shaping the current project. The pieces were burnt in October 2024, after being exhibited in various homes and spaces in the village. This action explores themes such as symbolic destruction, purification and renewal, as elements linked through dialogue with the urban and architectural spaces that will be intervened in Barcelona.

The installations created by Del Rivero as part of the Extramurs project, in collaboration with students from EINA Centre Universitari de Disseny i Art de Barcelona, will be exhibited both inside and outside the Museu Tàpies, in Centre d’Art La Capella, in Basílica Santa Maria del Pi, in the Teatre Grec gardens, in Galeria Senda and Loop Barcelona. The exhibition includes photographs, collages, objects and an illuminated sign. The cartography of these intervened spaces will invite us to reflect on the resilience of human and social structures, as well as on the dialogue between the past and the present, revealing the tensions and continuities that define the history of the construction of contemporary cities.

Transiting “La Quema” public programme includes the concert for church bells L’espai alliberat [Liberated Space] by Llorenç Barber, in collaboration with students from the ESMUC and the Conservatori Municipal de Música de Barcelona. The concert, set to take place on 8 July at 7.30 pm as part of the Grec Festival, is the project’s inaugural event. In addition, Loop Festival will feature an audiovisual programme that includes the screening of the film O carro e o home (1940) by Antonio Román and Xaquín Lorenzo, and a newly created documentary about La Quema, directed by  Improfilms, co-producers with A Casa do Pozo and The Paraclete. The documentary presentation will feature anthropologist Cristiana Bastos.

Elena del Rivero

Multidisciplinary artist working in painting and paper, she is inspired by everyday life and her immediate surroundings. Her projects develop slowly, building visual narratives that are completed with titles carefully chosen to favour double meanings.

Since the early 1990s, Del Rivero’s work has focused on repairing pieces that have been damaged, either intentionally or unintentionally, during the process of creating them. Committed to the act of sewing and mending, Del Rivero has produced large-scale installations such as [Swi:t] Home (2001), CHANT (2006) and the ongoing series Cartas a la Madre (Letters to the Mother), which began in 1992. At first glance, her work may seem autobiographical. Cloaked in a veil of poetic ambiguity, Del Rivero has chosen to never reveal details of her personal life. She has lived and worked in New York since 1991.

Her recent exhibitions include MACBA Collection: Prelude. Poetic Intention (Barcelona, 2022–2024), Love Song (Galeria Senda, Barcelona, 2022), My Friends and Other Animals II (Travesía Cuatro, Madrid, 2022), The Archive of Dust: An Ongoing Project (Es Baluard Museu d’Art Contemporani de Palma, 2022), Home Address: Suffrage (Henrique Faria Fine Art, New York, 2020), Tampa Museum of Arts (United States, 2021), The End of the World (Travesía Cuatro, Madrid, 2019) and My Friends and Other Animals (Travesía Cuatro, Madrid, 2016).

Del Rivero’s work is part of the collections of the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), Museum of Modern Art (New York), Brooklyn Museum of Art (New York), Yale University Art Gallery (New Haven), Fogg Art Museum (United States), National Gallery of Art (United States), Baltimore Museum of Art (United States), Colby College Museum of Art (United States), Pollock Gallery – Meadows School of the Arts (United States), Birmingham Museum of Art (United States), Es Baluard Museu d’Art Contemporani de Palma, Institut Valencià d’Art Modern (Valencia) and Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (Madrid), among others.

She held a residency at the Joan Mitchell Center in New Orleans (2017) and was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship (2019) and the Anonymous Was a Woman Award (2020) in the United States. Throughout her career, she has also received various other awards and grants, including the Prix de Rome from the Spanish Academy in Rome (1988), the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant (1991 and 1995), the Creative Capital Foundation Grant (2001), the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship (2001 and 2002), the Rockefeller Foundation Residency at the Bellagio Center (2005) and the Joan Mitchell Foundation Fellowship (2015).

Mateo Feijóo

His work is defined by its interdisciplinary approach, facilitating connections between artists from different disciplines. He currently directs FLIPAS – Laboratory of Urban Cultures, a project within the framework of EUNIC. He directed Naves Matadero – International Center for Performing Arts (2017-2020). He previously directed the Escena Contemporánea Festival of the Community of Madrid and the Teatro de La Laboral, a performance project within the framework of the City of Culture in Gijón (Asturias).

He has curated various visual arts projects, including Round Sky and Square Earth with Yu Depeng and Lucía Lorén; Sound Clamor with Llorenç Barber; The Road to Frankfurt 2022 program with the Goethe-Institut; The Kitchen, Homage to Saint Therese by Marina Abramovic; The End of the World and The Dust Archive by Elena del Rivero. Programmer of the 3, 2, 1 Festival and Prototipoak at Azkuna Zentroa in Bilbao, curator of the Streaming Egos project for the Art Forum in Düsseldorf.

As an advisor, he has collaborated on the creation of the Galician Choreographic Center; on the State Council of the Arts of the INAEM (National Institute of Arts and Culture); and as a dance advisor for AC/E.

From 2010 to 2019, he served on the selection panel for mobility aid projects for Cimetta Found and, as a professor, has collaborated on various Master’s programs in cultural management and theater creation. He currently teaches classes in the Master’s Program in Theater Creation at the Carlos III University of Madrid.

Extramurs is an initiative by the  Museu Tàpies with the collaboration of EINA Centre Universitari de Disseny i Art de Barcelona and festival Grec, and the complicity of Centre d’Art La Capella, Basílica Santa Maria del Pi, Galeria Senda and Loop Barcelona.

The realization of Elena del Rivero – La Quema, at Galicia, promoted by A Casa do Pozo, had the support of AECID and Fundación Cañada Blanch

La Quema, 5 October 2024. Photography: Pablo Gómez Ogando