The Other Shore
TACA
Mar Guerrero
May - June 2024
"The difference between the continental shore and the insular shore is that the former is where the sea begins, and the latter is where the land ends."[1]
Going in search of the unknown is a constant drive in the work of Mar Guerrero (1991, Palma). This quest manifests in her travels, speculation about fictional territories, the study of astronomy, and the exploration of the seabed. Such heterogeneity raises questions that connect different spaces and times. How can one imagine the surface of Mars from the desert? How can one contemplate the cosmos from the insular shore? These processes of propulsion are often tied to a specific context and thus depend significantly on the experience of inhabiting a place, with all its relational and symbolic implications.
TACA now presents her exhibition "The Other Shore," which reflects on the experience of the geographic and epistemological limit: that line where the known territory ends and beyond which it seems impossible to advance. Besides defining the experience of insularity, the shore is a metaphor, an anchorage point from which to speculate about other possible realities. In the exhibition, an audio piece[2] fills the space inhabited by aquatic organisms made of bluish glass. It is complex to determine the origin of these creatures, which could come from either the seabed or a distant planet...
In her various projects, the artist connects different epistemological communities, facilitating encounters between artistic practice and scientific research. From the decentered specificity of her own practice, she sprinkles those other disciplinary fields with aesthetic reflections and fictional speculations. In this case, at the shore-limit, we find beings with a complex temporality. For example, the series "Residual Cosmologies" (2023) is a set of five screen prints in which the artist fuses different residues to create organisms. The visual result lies somewhere between marine organisms, fossils of extinct species, or extraterrestrial beings. Meanwhile, "An Eternal Journey" (2023) consists of various sculptures that Mar Guerrero calls creatures. These aquatic forms, made of blown glass and canine hair, evoke stranded jellyfish, small cells, or planets seen through a telescope. This confluence between the micro and the macro, present in her work, also manifests as an intrinsic part of insular reality. In the words of the poet Sánchez Robayna, "the island sails in the cosmos. The Earth itself is nothing but an island sailing in the cosmos."[3] Therefore, where to place the limit if not in perspective? The other shore is where the eye does not reach, but curiosity does: it is a space of fictions, cosmologies, and eternal journeys.
[1] Robayna, Andrés Sánchez. Cuaderno de las islas (Islands Notebook). Barcelona: Lumen, 2011. Page 31.
[2] The audio piece "The Other Shore" has been developed especially for this exhibition in collaboration with Carles Oliver, while the glass works have been produced in the workshop of Pere and Gabi Ignasi.
[3] Ibíd. Page 26.