Artists

Bianca Bondi, Carlos Motta, Charwei Tsai, Alexander Apóstol, Bouchra Khalili, Rosella Bicotti, Daniel de la Barra

Press release

Drawn from a poem by the Spanish writer Antonio Machado, the exhibition title, Paths upon the Sea, invites us to consider the sea as a space of multiple layers. A land of legends and mysteries, a thriving ecosystem, it is also the stage for migratory and commercial routes, for relations of domination, power, and disappearance. The sea emerges as an unstable and elusive elsewhere, both a source of fascination and of tension.

In the works of Bouchra Khalili, Carlos Motta, and Alexander Apóstol, the sea appears as both a dangerous and hopeful space—a political frontier where human trajectories shaped by survival, control, and the desire for a better life unfold. Across distinct historical and geographical contexts, their works remind us that migration is a constant in human history, often rendered invisible or normalized despite the violence of sea crossings.

With Sea-Drifts, Bouchra Khalili maps one of the world’s most dangerous migratory routes, linking the coasts of North and West Africa to the Canary Islands. By transforming clandestine journeys into constellations, she replaces official maps with a counter-cartography grounded in migrants’ lived experiences, where the sea becomes a space of loss, memory, and orientation. The use of indigo simultaneously evokes a local craft tradition and the colonial history of global trade, situating these individual trajectories within a longer history of forced circulation.

In the series Colonial Forts, Carlos Motta approaches the sea from a historical and architectural perspective. Photographed from the inside, Caribbean colonial forts open their windows onto the ocean. Stripped of any spectacular monumentality, these images emphasize the true function of such architectures: to control bodies, organize exploitation, and maintain colonial order. The gaze oscillates between that of the conqueror and the prisoner, suspended before a sea that embodies both the horizon of freedom and the impossibility of reaching it.

160 Inmigrantes en Times New Roman by Alexander Apóstol situates these issues within a precise media and historical context. By reproducing verbatim a newspaper article from May 1949 recounting the clandestine arrival of Canarian migrants in Venezuela aboard a fishing boat, the artist recalls an episode shaped by postwar economic hardship and migration restrictions in force until 1952. Presenting the article without alteration underscores the apparent neutrality of media discourse, which transforms dangerous crossings and hopes for a better life into anonymous facts, erasing individual experiences and depoliticizing migration.

Rossella Biscotti approaches the sea as a space of memory and disappearance. In the project The Journey, a monumental block of marble is extracted, transported, and submerged in the Mediterranean along a symbolic route linking Italy, Malta, Tunisia, and Libya. The photographs presented capture the sea’s surface at the precise moment of immersion. Here, the sea becomes a silent repository of buried histories, a place where the immaterial and the solid, presence and absence, coexist.

This political dimension of the sea finds critical resonance in the concept of “maritime blindness” developed by Daniel de la Barra. The artist examines how the sea has historically been reduced to a romantic backdrop or a neutral space, concealing the economic, military, and migratory flows that traverse it. Today, the Mediterranean functions as a militarized border: while goods circulate freely, thousands of lives are placed at risk.

In counterpoint to this dangerous and controlled sea-border, the exhibition opens onto another dimension: that of repair and spirituality. Beneath the surface, the sea becomes once again a site of wonder and projection, an invisible world inhabited by living forms, beliefs, and symbolic forces. In An Offering, Charwei Tsai delicately inscribes the Heart Sutra onto seashells, following their natural lines of growth. The sea here becomes a space for meditation on impermanence and the fragility of life.

This transition continues in the work of Bianca Bondi, where salt—omnipresent in the artist’s practice and throughout the first-floor exhibition—refers to the sea as a site of healing, memory, and invisible communication. Created in collaboration with the Manufacture d’Aubusson, the tapestry Tidal Spill translates marine photographic images into softened, repaired textile surfaces. The act of weaving becomes one of care and transformation.

Thus, far from any univocal vision, the exhibition approaches the sea in its plurality: both border and sanctuary, surface and depth, danger and space for contemplation. An unstable site charged with human histories, it becomes the stage for resistance and transformation, opening onto a horizon still imbued with promise.