The project 'Solar Narratives', which seeks a just ecological transition, chooses María Auxiliadora Gálvez for its artistic work.

The first meetings with clients are already underway and the inauguration is scheduled for the spring of next year.

The architect and landscape architect, María Auxiliadora Gálvez, is the artist chosen for the production of the work of the project of La Sobarriba (León), ‘Solar Narratives’, which brings together the desire of some of the people living in the region to make the problems and contradictions visible, The project is a key element in the development of the project, both eco-socially and on a personal and emotional level, that arise in its territory with the installation of a macro-solar plant..

At words of the artist herself, After the first contact with the project's mediator, Alfredo Escapa, he was immediately interested in the proposal because it is situated in the line of ‘somatic activism’ in which he has been working, which combines architecture and the somatic or bodily, as well as the realisation of different experiences in places that defend something or undertake a struggle: “I saw that it allowed me to work on something that I have wondered about before and, moreover, with a community that was also defending a form of ecological transition, non-extractivist, to ask ourselves how this step can be made by going beyond the ‘origin of energy’ and ‘how this affects people, societies and territory’.”.

To meet this challenge, he allies himself with the idea of the transformative potential of art and culture, above all to “enrich perceptions that allow us to see other sensibilities”. Something he sees as revolutionary because it generates changes in the underlying imaginaries of a society: “Art and architecture, if we really give them space, are a revolutionary weapon to promote this enrichment of perceptions, and Concomitentes has a very important role to play here”.

Inspiration in artistic creation

The first meetings with the commissioners began in July, when they spent a week walking the territory and assessing the places where they could intervene. A rich and “fascinating” process, enriched by the exchange of knowledge and subtleties of the group. “I would be interested in activating a somatic work in which the group will feed the piece itself from its orientation, how the movements of the people in the place are produced, in what way the piece can open and close habits... and how it can be a place of activism and meditation for these reflections”.

After these first encounters, and with a calendar where the processes of participation and collective enrichment will be revived, María Auxiliadora is working on a work connected to the sun and the earth, a piece between the concept of a “scientific observatory” and, at the same time, one that gives an understanding of how the movement of the sun creates the seasons.

“The point we are at now is to think of a certain ‘pavilion’ that acquires a circular geometry, which has a front where the sun is exposed (...) and, on the opposite side of this pavilion, the activism, struggles and phrases of this claim of the patrons would be registered”, explains the artist.

Artistic tour

María Auxiliadora holds a PhD in Architecture, as well as being a landscape architect and teacher of the Feldenkrais Method of Somatic Education. Since 1998 she has been teaching at the San Pablo Ceu University in Madrid. In 2016 she founded the ‘Plataforma de Somática aplicada a la Arquitectura y el Paisaje’ - “Platform for Somatics applied to Architecture and Landscape”.PSAAP, where aspects of ecology are tackled from the experience of the body in art, and in architectural, urban and landscape design.

He has recently collaborated with institutions such as the Municipal Gallery in Oporto, the Tanz Quartier in Vienna and the Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid. Her work has been published in the monograph “Excepto 21. Active Cartographies” (2008) and is the author of “Somatic Space. Cuerpos Múltiples” (2019) and “Descampados” (2022).

Regarding the future of the piece, Auxi stresses that she does not believe in the permanence of the object itself, but rather in the practice of vindication and the perceptual experience that it can promote: “If the piece creates life, it will have worked”.

The opening is scheduled for next spring.