Opening event on Thursday 12 June at 7 pm and award ceremony at 8 pm

The Flowers That Grow in the Abyss That I Am, an exhibition of the artworks by the finalists of the Miquel Casablancas 2025, organized by Sant Andreu Contemporani

Artists: Ali Arévalo, Daniel Cao, Jorge Isla, Victoria Maldonado, Usama Mossa Chaty, Maya Pita-Romero, txe roimeser, Miguel Rubio Tapia, Laura San Segundo and Alejandría Cinque, Lucas Selezio de Souza, Paula Vilageliu Porlein

Dossiers. Project: Salva G. Ojeda, Mourae, Maya Pita-Romero, Eduard Ruiz;  Mediation: Sarah King, Iris Verge Ferrer and Miquel Hernández Vallès, Massa Salvatge; Graphic Communication: CEGimeno, Clara Pessanha, Marian Vélez Luque

In the face of the threat, that dark times are ahead, a reflection by Gramsci has recently been recovered, one loaded with hope: “The old world is dying and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.” Centuries ago, art established the idea that the sleep of reason produces monsters and it seems easy perhaps to recognise them in the infamous characters at the centre of the politics of the new world order. This monster is not outside our society: it is normalised in discourses that appeal to common sense and freedom, while the frontier between what is democratic and what is authoritarian is blurred, leading to a system that has come to be called ‘neofeudalism’. Sure enough, monsters populated mediaeval maps until they were displaced by the winds of incipient global capitalism, which we can see in the map Untitled, from the series “Plus Ultra” (2024), embroidered by Lucas Selezio de Sousa. This was when they came to inhabit the inside of those men who propagated nationalism based on colonisation, extractivism, annihilation and the systematic expulsion of peoples from their lands, such as the family experience of Usama Mossa, as told in the installation Hombre de Barro / الطین رجل (2025), which gives an account of the barbarism suffered by the Palestinian people since the middle of the last century and up to this very moment.

However, what is monstrous has been more of a cultural construction used to point out what is outside the norm and deserves to be expelled from society, articulating concepts such as otherness and different, and demonstrating the artificialness of myths of origin, as Miguel Rubio Tapis reflects on regarding the falsification, assembly and reconstruction of history around the guanche in the Canary Islands (People say we’re alike, they say we’ve got the same hair, 2024). For this same reason, monstrous is a term that can be appropriated and inhabited as if it were a refuge where imagining the future can be cultivated. This is what Daniel Cao does in the project VINADER: SONS BIOLÒGICS (2022-2024), in which he explores the relationship between nature and science fiction, speculating on the possibility of extraterrestrial life as the central theme of a biofuturistic story. In fact, the origin of the term monstrum appears in classical mythology as a warning or supernatural sign, perhaps a caution from the gods about something out of the ordinary that was about to happen, without necessarily implying something negative. In the photo-performance project Las hijas de Minerva (2024), Laura San Segundo and Alejandría Cinque resignify the iconography of the goddess when challenging the spaces that stem from male sociability, such as pool halls. On the pool table, as in our bodies, there are multiple holes, hiding places that can be slipped through to shelter from the world, like a mole awaiting a future revolution. Holes also populate Jorge Isla’s work Fotosíntesis (2025), but in this case on a technological body, a witness to the impact of human activity on nature.

From a queer perspective, the body is, in effect, a technology. The transgender body has had holes made in it, like Frankenstein’s: “a flesh torn apart and sewn back together”. This embodied dissidence, defined by Suzanne Stryker or Donna Haraway as a new trans-forming beauty, expands as a generative territory from where the limits can be rethought and the act of self-creation, symbolically reserved for the gods, defied. txe roimeser takes on this enormous challenge with the support of a production grant from the Hangar Centre, the collaboration of La Capella’s Transmarikabibollo School of Context and the post-operative care provided by their affectionate environment, as attested through the installation abrazar con las piernas –antes, durante y después de la anestesia total– (2024). The modelling of soft bodies and the affective interaction with other bodies also forms part of Paula Vilageliu Porlein’s formal investigations in works such as Abrazo y dejo un _ (2023), where she explores gaps, leakages and forms that emerge from this gesture. 

Understood to be something that escapes the natural order, queer monstrosity multiplies the possibilities of rethinking the very idea of culture, recognising it as an artefact and eclipsing any taxonomic order. Maya Pita-Romero approaches what is monstrous as a release, through hybrids of human and vegetable bodies. Una lengua cansada (2025) is the result of a search for the possibilities of these interstitial bodies, articulated by scars and broken identities from which the language emerges, as artificial as art and culture, and through which we seem to hear Paul B. Preciado telling us: “I am the monster that speaks to you.” It is a mouth that grows and does not obey, opposing an entire tradition of misogyny that has found in the monster the incarnation of the social construction of woman that is to be feared. As a radical otherness, the monster is unrepresentable, which is why Victoria Maldonado engenders it through a mutant and tentacular beauty in Folklore de ultratumba (2024), reinventing the limits of skin and flesh, to make us inhabit it. The anomalous pleasures, the resistance and, at the same time, the vulnerability of non-binary soft bodies are incarnated in Ali Arévalo’s work La rebelión consiste en mirar una rosa hasta pulverizarse los ojos (2024), a rebellion that is invented with each petal of the flowers that grow in the abyss represented by the flesh itself.

This is how these 11 finalists in the Miquel Casablancas 2025 call for proposals at Sant Andreu Contemporani fertilise the flowers that anticipate a new world and prefigure future transformations of new generations of artists. They are flowers that grow without permission, they do so by their own desire to exist in a gesture of transgression of the existing order and an incarnated crossing of memories, genders and transcultural geographies. They are flowers that we are barely able to illuminate in the abyss in which they grow, but it is from there that they speak to us. From this abyss, beautiful and dark at the same time, these works reveal that what is monstrous is not simply abominable, but a symbolic figure that confronts us with our own limits and fears, with what we do not want to see. But Leopoldo María Panero encouraged us from his dark poetry to walk through the softness of danger, the danger of living again. Perhaps he had in mind the verses of another poet who said, “But where there is danger, a rescuing element grows as well.”