A place can be many things: the unmoving surface surrounding the body, a permanent receptacle, a poetic image, the space, a thought, a corner. It can be something that exists in the outside, and it can be something that comes from within.

The body is also a place. It is, in fact, the primordial one. It is the place of sense, the site from where we negotiate things, the others, the world. As Michel Foucault wrote in his lecture The Utopian Body (1966), “my body is like the City of the Sun, it has no place, but is from it that all possible places, real or utopian, emerge and irradiate 1”.

Thus, bodies and places are irremediably linked to each other, and this is the reason why places appear in this exhibition. Every piece in it reminds us that it is in relation to the body that there is a below, an above, a right, a left, a front and a back, a near and a far. They are subtle acts of the place, poetic images transformed into objects; works of art that either in three dimensions or only two, elicit the feeling of depths and spaces that can be experienced by the body, or that are the body itself.

Moreover, places appear in this exhibition because the drawings and sculptures of María García Ibáñez and Selina Baumann that silently dialogue with each other in the space of the gallery, have become, in the words of Georges Didi-Huberman, a skull. The skull, he writes in his book Être Crane (2000), is “a sculptural object because of a very esencial and organic reason: the fact that our own brain is unable to imagine its true spaciality. 2” Therefore, places appear because every work is a poetic image that has imagined the physical dimensions of its own space, and the sensation of place that emerges from them reaches out and surrounds us.

1 Michel Focault, “The Utopian Body”,1966, in Sensorium, MIT Press, 2006

2 Georges Didi-Huberman, Être crâne: lieu, contact, pensée, sculpture, Éditions de Minuit, 2000