For Liste 2023 we propose a project with works by the artists Lara Fluxà and Rosa Tharrats. Both artists work with materials from an expansive and collaborative point of view, understanding their installations as tentacular bodies that need each other and that imagine new cultures based on coexistence and care.

In the case of Fluxà, her glass pieces function as conductive systems and carriers of liquids. Sea water, salt or tar are contained within amorphous and fragile glass forms that place the expectant body in a dangerous space. Visitors gradually enter the material and formal landscape of her pieces. The fragility of the installation and the objects that compose are left in the hands of an indeterminate “we”, in which everyone plays an inescapable role. The possibility of an accident appears as a determining factor in this meticulous and slow choreography that modulates the action of the bodies and their circulation in spaceRosa Tharrats’ works are mutant and are inserted in an organic logic that goes beyond the univocal existence of the closed work itself. The fabrics she uses are constantly displaced and reused. Tharrats is interested in the sensorial and spiritual communication between different “species” of animated materials and bodies. A painted jacket that until recently was used as a more or less conventional piece of clothing suddenly becomes a binder that unites two materials and thus becomes a new piece. The unexpected alliance of the jacket with another material creates a new plastic creature and changes the previous functions of the objects. Copulations are produced not only between different kinds of “inert” matter but also between industrial materials and lichens, between plastics found on the seabed and algae, etc.

The works of both artists try to escape from their condition as solid substances, they do not support their materiality, which in the tension of evasion makes their lushness even more evident, their desire to expand, to spread and concentrate, to expel, to grow and to touch (“tentacle” comes from the Latin “tentaculum”, which means “antenna”, and from “tentare”, “to feel”, “to try”) and refers above all to the question of contact and communication between species of materials.

The choice of works for the booth attempts to connect the two practices through their expansive nature. Rosa Tharrat’s textile works and Fluxà’s glass sculptures containing liquids, are conceived as installations that engage with each other through their fluidity, generating a dialogue that highlights their performativity and awareness of the environment.