Habitar el Cuerpo Exhibition

Barcelona, May 2025

In one of our first conversations, Juliana Sorondo remarked that the works gathered in this exhibition—despite their formal and material diversity—seemed to conjure a shared idea: the body as a habitable space, formally delimited, a repository of individual memory, and ultimately something that can be loved, hated, or transformed by us, its legitimate inhabitants. Indeed, many of the reflections offered by the four artists in this show about their own practice align, to greater or lesser degrees, with this perspective. However, convinced that my role here should be neither neutral nor passive, I will take the liberty of questioning both the idea and the preliminary title of this exhibition—To Inhabit the Body—of adding a mark of doubt to its phrasing and turning the certainty of its statement into a question. I will thus abandon the usual caution of a wall text in favor of a far more meddlesome stance. To inhabit the body? To what extent is the notion of dwelling an adequate approach today, a misleading figure, or an inevitable experience of corporeality?

The metaphors we use to describe the world can be as enlightening as they are dangerous. Their success or failure has always depended on the interplay of various social, philosophical, and scientific factors, as well as on the presence—or absence—of shared cultural imaginaries. In this sense, metaphors not only reveal our historical position and the state of our beliefs, but they can also perpetuate biases, epistemic blind spots, and contradictions. I'm sure, for instance, that almost none of the artists brought together here—nor most readers of this text—would accept a dualistic worldview, which they would likely also deem outdated or even regressive. And yet, does not the very understanding of the body as a dwelling place echo a certain Cartesianism? Isn't the very idea of architecture a res extensa—a thing extended—designed to contain something other and, above all, separable from itself?

In reality, given the neo-materialist climate in which contemporary art is currently unfolding, it’s likely that both these artists and their audience would feel more at ease defending a Spinozist perspective, one in which there is no room for dualism, only modalities of a single materiality. In this view, the mind is simply a part of the body: specifically, the awareness, sensibility, or idea of a body always entangled, capable of affecting and being affected by others. We might still refer to the body as a place—this time, an embodied one—but the terminological problem raised by the metaphor would persist. As is well known, the words inhabit and habit (both in the sense of learned behavior and of clothing) stem from the Latin verb habere, which means to have. Thus, to inhabit the body leads us once again to a kind of separability—precisely, to the idea of possession, if not directly to commodification—implying that the body is something external that we have, rather than what we are. I suspect Spinoza would strongly object to this turn of events—as, indeed, would much of the premodern Western tradition to which we are equally heirs.¹

The question that interests me—and which is always embedded in artistic practices—is how we come to conceive of ourselves and our bodies within a specific social context that, to some extent, shapes us. I wonder, ultimately, what drives our metaphors and why they persist, even when they contradict our stated beliefs. If the ghosts of Cartesianism and neoliberalism surface through the innocent (and poetic) idea of inhabiting the body, perhaps we should ask what conditions are allowing such manifestations.

Around 1930, Gabriel Marcel wrote about the alienating effect of the modern tendency to turn being into having, to instrumentalize and objectify everything—including the body and human relationships.² The philosopher observed that the experience of having a body, also shaped by language, becomes evident when we exercise control over it, evaluate it based on its appearance or utility, or treat it as if it were at our disposal. The portrait of our era resembles what Marcel described, albeit worsened in many ways. Never before has the body been manipulable to the extent it is now, and never before has there been such a deep disassociation between the person and what sustains them. Biotechnology, genetic engineering, plastic surgery, organ transplants, migration, nomadism, precarity, networks, and the digital world are just some of the forces that reinforce a seemingly outdated dualism. All of these separate us from the body with the same intensity that they compel us to reclaim it. It is within this irresolvable tension—both conceptual and experiential—that the idea of inhabiting the (fugitive) body—of (re)claiming it or entrusting it with the protection of our fragile self—perhaps takes on its paradoxical meaning. I believe this condition, far from being temporary, constitutes the very atmosphere that has long enveloped us. For this reason, we would do well to examine our metaphors and beliefs, for we may, unwittingly, be slipping down a path as inevitable as it is risky and contradictory.

I would say it is precisely this disjunctive and conciliatory force between identity and the body that quietly nourishes the work of the four artists in this exhibition. It is important to note, moreover, that none of them speaks of the body in the abstract, but rather of particular bodies—their own or those of others—but always of signified bodies, in the Thomist sense of the term. As if, amid all these oscillations, the only space left were that of unraveling the mystery of the lived body.

I think, for instance, of the image of the ancient "moving stone" of Tandil that has long fascinated Angyvir Padilla (Caracas, 1987), and which is always displayed alongside the performance From There, to Here and from Other Places(2021). The image shows the miracle of uncertain balance—the fortunate coincidence of swaying without falling. How can one sustain oneself in displacement, in forgetfulness, or in upheaval? Surely through a compensatory, involuntary, almost supernatural movement. I am shaken—and I use the word deliberately—watching Padilla’s small body traverse the enormous metallic hopscotches and raise them to the sky. I am shaken not so much by the symbolism of the action as by the sensory, visual, and sonic dimension of the trembling. A body that trembles is always a body acting uncontrollably, thus resisting instability, fear, or loss.³ However violent it may seem, trembling paradoxically allows for collapse to be compensated. It is in critical moments that the body comes to our aid to prevent the complete destruction of our identity and, at the same time, to remind us—somatically—that there are still things beyond our control.

Balance dynamics also run through the photographs of Daniel Santolo (Caracas, 1994). Throughout his work, there is a tendency to place natural elements in impossible states of flotation, displacement, and weightlessness. One of his statements stands out to me: "The body is the only thing the immigrant possesses." I understand what he means, though I would phrase it differently: the body is the only certainty of the immigrant. Not coincidentally, in The Body as Space and Territory (2019), Santolo plays with bodily objectification and confusion. Exploiting the tonal similarity between skin colors and using corporeality as material or tool, the artist merges—until they are indistinguishable—fragments of his own body with those of a female, anonymized body. This lack of differentiation outlines a mountainous terrain, genderless, from which stone-like elements emerge that swap roles with the flesh. The inert assimilates the living, the subject the object. This is no minor gesture. Formal or functional confusion is often the visual translation of uncertainty. Faced with these images, I cannot help but think of the ambivalences of precarity and displacement: how rootlessness often disguises itself as freedom, homogenization as belonging, and bodily instrumentalization as empowerment and adaptation.

The dialogue between subject and object is also present, though in a different way, in the work of Hodei Herreros (Vitoria-Gasteiz / Granada, 1997). Here we encounter a series of pieces that could be interpreted as the artist’s objectual alter ego. A silver-plated cup stands at lip level; a corset pattern reproduces her bust and her preference for strapless necklines; a wooden skirt mimics her body measurements. Furthermore, all these metonymies of femininity are made up using the techniques she applies to her own skin. Herreros always moves in the fold of an embellished surface that replicates itself infinitely. The body as garment, ornament as figure. I would say the unspoken meaning of these pieces is, in fact, a reflection on the concept of kanon, understood simultaneously as rule and model—a tool for measurement, a set of norms, and a paradigm to emulate. I wonder, in front of this double, schematic body: who sculpts whom? Who is the model, who the pattern? Who receives the form and who imposes it? Artist and embodied object endlessly swap roles, making it impossible to pinpoint who comes first. Nor is it clear whether we are dealing with rules of beauty or the beauty of rules; with aesthetic generality or the aesthetics of gender. What’s interesting—and even provocative—is that the body conceived by Herreros does not escape regulation or standardization. Rather, it proudly displays its normativity, narrowing the gap between identity and canonical appearance.

Moving in the opposite direction, Manuela Benaim (Caracas, 1996) understands the body as a perishable membrane that traces the boundary between the temporal and the eternal. Her sculptural work seems dedicated to exploring the possibilities of epidermal separation. Through molds of real bodies and SPFX techniques, the artist plays with surreal exchanges of surfaces, replacing fabrics, mirrors, or canvases with fleshy silicone. What interests me especially is the evidentiary nature of her works—not only because they have been in direct contact with the model’s skin, but because they freeze and reconstruct its appearance at a specific moment in time. This gesture echoes ancient theories of relics and resurrection,⁴ myths of skin shedding as form-changing, but also the contemporary logic of transplantation and the transhumanist conception of the body as a replaceable shell. It’s no coincidence that Benaim presents a piece that feels almost like a tribute to the fragmentology of corpuses and bodies, bringing us back to the modern idea of the body as a set of separable, manipulable parts. Thus, a linear community of transferred and framed bodily fragments emerges, each sized to fit the frame (rather than the other way around). Straddling painting and sculpture, these membra disjecta reflect, among other things, the contemporary atomization of the subject, plunging us into the epistemic, ethical, and aesthetic dilemma of whether or not to recompose the lost unity.

¹ The complexity of history, particularly Western history, prevents us from asserting that there has ever been a single definition of the body, just as there has never been a purely dualistic and/or essentialist view of it. In fact, this history is full of internal dialectics, discontinuities, and highly sophisticated ways of understanding bodily issues. Like it or not, it is precisely because we are heirs to this rich and turbulent tradition—irreducible to the short period of modernity—that we remain entangled in these matters. See Caroline Walker Bynum’s 1995 article: Why All the Fuss about the Body? A Medievalist’s Perspective, in Critical Inquiry 22 (1):1–33.
² I refer here to the texts published in the book Being and Having (1995).
³ I write this thinking of Jacques Derrida’s 2009 article: How Not to Tremble?, in Acta Poética, 30(2), 19–34.
⁴ Remember, for instance, that for Thomas Aquinas the body would be fully restored at resurrection, retaining all its characteristics from life. Likewise, Benaim’s skins show all the specificity of the bodies they represent.

Text by Belén Zahera

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