Artists

Saâdane Afif, Nicolás Paris, Alexander Apóstol, Rosella Bicotti

Press release

Take a seat, the geometry lesson is about to begin. But here there will be no calculations or exercises on the board. This presentation proposes to reinvent geometry as a language, a tool for deconstruction, narration, and critical thinking. Through a variety of media, the artists in this exhibition, Saâdane Afif, Alexander Apóstol, Rossella Biscotti, and Nicolás Paris, go beyond traditional academic and aesthetic uses to reveal geometry as a way of organizing the world, an instrument of power, and also a gateway to artistic creation.

During the Marrakech Biennale in 2014, Saâdane Afif staged a unique performance on Jemaa El Fna Square: each evening a teacher taught the basics of geometry in Arabic to a circle of curious passersby. This participatory work, blending knowledge and spectacle in public space, explores geometry as a universal language and a tool for sharing.

From this performance, Afif developed other projects: a theatre piece imagining a world where inhabitants speak in geometry, followed by a series of sculptural seats (The Heptaedron Seat Series) based on the forms addressed in the lessons. These objects connect design, narrative, and mathematical abstraction and embody Afif’s approach of letting ideas, forms, and stories circulate beyond disciplinary boundaries.

A tension between measurement and subjectivity runs through Rossella Biscotti’s tapestries, where the grids of weaving intersect with those of demographic census-taking. In the series Other, the artist uses Jacquard-woven textiles to expose the biases of statistical classification systems. Each tapestry translates demographic data into form and color, but above all seeks to make visible those erased by traditional censuses: families and individuals living in so-called institutional housing, such as refugee centers, psychiatric hospitals, or collective shelters.

Other (60 persons house) and Other (44 persons house) take two examples of such living spaces and represent the population distribution: blue and green indicate the proportion of men and women, while other axes show age and number of residents. Here, geometry is the geometry of data, structured and graphic, yet deeply political because it reveals the blind spots of official narratives.

Alexander Apóstol explores the geometry of politics, focusing on Venezuela’s electoral history. After the fall of the dictatorship in 1958, democratic opening and the legalization

of political parties led to a proliferation of ideologically diverse formations. Each party was assigned a distinct color and symbol on the ballots, transforming voting into a dense, codified graphic landscape.

In the exhibition, two series of works highlight these visual elements. Through this gesture, the ballots become vestiges of a declining democracy, where parties gradually lost ideological substance and public trust. In Partidos políticos que han desaparecido en la Democracia, Apóstol removes all text, leaving only the colored grounds of the ballots, like empty imprints of a vanished political past.

In Color is My Business, he extends the reflection through monochrome panels that condense the ideological evolution of these parties until their eventual disappearance. The visual brilliance of these works is as captivating as it is questioning: behind the pared-down abstraction, political markers dissolve, revealing the ambiguities of an electoral language that is aesthetically attractive but emptied of meaning.

At the heart of Nicolás Paris’s practice is an exploration of pedagogical structures and learning dynamics. A former teacher in rural Colombia, he has developed a practice based on transmission, exchange, and experimentation. His series Naturaleza Doméstica (butacas) functions as a pedagogical tool, both playful and mobile. Geometry is freed from its institutional framework to become fluid, organic, and almost alive. The furniture he designs, deliberately unstable and modular, evokes an everyday geometry that is not fixed but responsive to gestures, uses, and moving bodies.

In Somos fermento, Paris stages a geometric game where the unpredictable vitality of the living meets human precision. Fabrics once used to proof bread, marked with traces of fermented dough and flour, retain the memory of an organic process governed by time and chance. Stretched and redeployed on the whiteness of paper, they receive a clear line and precise framing, like a second writing. Between spontaneous fermentation and geometric incision, the work becomes a formal dialogue between nature and culture.

Thus, Geometrical Lessons does not teach geometry; it reveals its possibilities. The works gathered here invite us to consider it not as a neutral system but as a tool for interpreting reality, a discipline that each artist rewrites in their own way to question the world and propose alternative narratives.