Descearte
Born from the encounter between place, memory, and climate, deseARTe listens for the earth’s voice; a voice that speaks through transformation. The planet responds to human action not with words, but with shifting rhythms; droughts, floods, heat, wind and the fierce, unseasonal rains of the gota fría, the cold drops that now fall harder and more violently than before.
deseARTe (Dese-art-e) Spanish for “to desire you” is an artistic dialogue between the earth and its silence. But is there really silence?
Born from the encounter between place, memory, and climate, deseARTe listens for the earth’s voice; a voice that speaks through transformation. The planet responds to human action not with words, but with shifting rhythms; droughts, floods, heat, wind and the fierce, unseasonal rains of the gota fría, the cold drops that now fall harder and more violently than before.
To explore our relationship with these changes, I spent a month in Vélez-Blanco, in Almería one of Europe’s driest regions. I want to experience, through my own senses, the impact of distant human activity on this remote landscape. What do I see, smell, hear, and feel here?
On the first walks the clay ground cracks under my feet, giving a sound and visual to the drought.
The chalky scent and taste grow stronger on windy days.
The burning sun presses on my skin, awakening a deep desire for shade and water.
Vélez-Blanco holds the traces of time with fossils, and cave art created over 6,000 years ago. These ancient marks remind me that humans have long turned to the earth as a surface for communication and that the land still holds both their memory and ours.
The works in deseARTe are made with local clays, fragments of the terrain transform into gesture, texture, and trace to help me answer the question;
How can I express the voice of the earth?
Inspired by prehistoric cave art, these paintings revisit humanity’s first conversations with the land, at a time when the planet’s own voice grows faint under the weight of climate change. Each mark becomes a memory of contact: from clay to pigment, from human to earth, from the ancient to the urgent.
In deseARTe, the desert breathes presence, resilience, and remembrance.
On a personal level, the remoteness of the region, with the lack of familiar tools and resources, opens my senses further. Play becomes my method. The mind grows quiet; the heart listens.
Using pigments derive from the land itself, I translate the tones, textures, and atmosphere of Vélez-Blanco into a visual and tactile language reminiscent of cave and rock art, humanity’s earliest form of environmental communication. These works carry reminders of time, erosion, and endurance as the earth’s own vocabulary.
The earth still speaks beneath its cracking surface.
In the echo of ancient marks, we rediscover our connection to the planet; fragile, circular, and profoundly alive.