Presented by: ESPRONCEDA – Institute of Art & Culture
Location: Carrer d’Espronceda 326, Nau 4–5, 08027 Barcelona
Opening: September 25th, 2025, 18:30-21:30
Exhibition dates: September 26–28, 2025
The exhibition “We Stay With the Trouble” brings together works created during E-ART’s ART LABS residency at ESPRONCEDA Institute of Art and Culture. Over several weeks, nine artists worked on collective projects based on experimentation, exchange, and sustainability.
The proposals presented explore different approaches to upcycling and sustainable practices, in line with the spirit of E-ART (Artists Influence – Support the Co-Creation, Circulation, and Promotion of Sustainability and Climate Change in Europe). This European project, funded by Erasmus+, aims to provide artists with tools for their professional development while promoting ecologically conscious creative practices.
The exhibition is also part of NEB & Inclusio 2025, Espronceda’s annual artistic research program inspired by the New European Bauhaus, which fosters new perspectives on sustainability, social justice, and cultural innovation.
We Stay With the Trouble. Nine assemblages with invisible natures
This exhibition responds to Donna Haraway’s call to “stay with the trouble”, exploring how to live within damaged ecological, technological, and social worlds. Instead of seeking a lost purity, nine emerging artists propose practices of care, imagination, and coexistence through assemblages of “invisible natures”: dust, oysters, wounds, foliage, sea glass, electromagnetic frequencies, cables, textiles, and fragments of the self.
By amplifying what usually remains unnoticed, the works shift perception from merely looking to truly seeing, cultivating an ethics of relation and interdependence. Together, they form an ecology of practices that embraces fragility, resilience, and speculative futures.
This exhibition is therefore a manifesto: to stay with the trouble, to live with ruins, and to inhabit fragility differently—with attentiveness, resonance, and care. It reminds us that change begins not only with policy or technology, but with perception itself: how we see, what we choose to see, and the care we extend to what is revealed.
LIST OF WORKS
Guilherme Simas
Swarm archive
Found objects: frequencies
An installation that decodes hidden layers of the city. The urban landscape becomes a living archive where residual, fragmented, and unheard signals swarm across space and time. Images from a film archive intertwine with an archive of antennas, both set into motion by live frequencies transmitted in real time. This shifting interplay reflects on the shortening of time and space caused by the accelerating speed of communication, where past and present collapse into a single resonant field. An antenna can be nothing—an obsolete technology, a sculpture, or even a dragonfly. To become a dragonfly is to reinvent the swarm, yet it is not enough to say antennas are dragonflies, since television is real.
Cristina Sanuy Hereter
The grass is always greener on the other pavement
Found object: green
This installation imagines a present where small robots wander through hyper-urban cities, reacting to every patch of green with a sharp, unexpected scream. Built from found objects and guided by simple movements, they become unlikely witnesses to overlooked spaces: the parks, planters, and patches of grass that quietly shape urban life. Inside the gallery, the robots navigate a miniature cityscape marked with green spots, while evolving illustrations envision multispecies encounters. Visitors’ responses to the question What do you think when another species reacts to a green space? feed new illustrations each day, weaving a collective narrative. The work gives voice to an artificial species that “sees” what we overlook, sparking play and speculation about fragile networks of life.
Aitanna Pascual
Ghost in the copper
Found objects: cables and circuit boards
An installation with crystallisation through marine salts, found cables, and circuit boards, reflecting on the tension between global telecommunication infrastructures and organic processes of resistance. The project explores electronic and fossil waste, linking underwater systems with social contexts and environmental impacts. By upcycling discarded circuit boards and cables—once at the end of their useful life—into aesthetic, political, and poetic functions, the work reflects on climate crisis, overextraction, and resilience.
Mar Gene
Laboratory of dust
Found object: dust
Dust, often dismissed as insignificant, is revealed as a living archive of memory and environment. In this installation, dust particles collected in Espronceda are magnified under a microscope in real time, transforming the invisible into the visible. A participatory archive invites visitors to annotate their observations, weaving a speculative story of dust that grows throughout the exhibition. At the intersection of experimental practice and collective memory, the work reframes dust as testimony of the world we inhabit.
Soledad Marcote/ New Errror
Anadyomene, Las Coralinas
Found object: oysters
A series of installations made from oysters, collected from gastronomy’s industrial waste. The works range from expanded sculptural installations to instruments and a laboratory for distilling oyster-based perfumes. Inspired by the symbolic and ecological role of oysters—luxury product yet essential for biodiversity—the pieces propose oysters as both mythological figures and ecological actors. Echoing Aphrodite’s emergence from the sea (Anadyomene), the work explores sensuality, sustainability, and contradictions of overexploitation and ecological regeneration.
Sara Broto
Washed wounds – a healing ritual in a Mediterranean landscape
Found objects: wounds
An immersive installation set on the Mediterranean coast, where found organic fragments—bricks, bark, reeds—become testimonies of both environmental damage and resilience. These objects are transformed into instruments, prolonging their resonance beyond erosion. A suspended tear-shaped structure of vegetal paper and copper thread houses inscribed research fragments and a soundscape that shifts from sea rhythms to weeping. Visitors are invited to moisten objects with seawater, participating in a collective healing ritual that reimagines wounds not as hidden, but as transformed and resonant.
Mara Adina
Scraps of Self
Found object: textiles
A sculptural installation of textiles collected over ten years, coated with homemade bioplastic, accompanied by film and spoken word. The fragments unravel and reconfigure into fragile new forms, exploring grief, rupture, and the possibility of becoming otherwise. Each textile carries traces of past lives, forming a metamorphic exhalation that breaks down imposed identities while reaching toward speculative, interdependent futures.
David Feroce
The soul of the sea. Returning nature to its sacred and protected status
Found objects: sea glass, fragility, ecosystem, sacred
A sculptural goddess figure made from sea crystals polished by waves, embodying fragility, transparency, and transformation of aquatic ecosystems. The work reclaims water bodies as sacred entities, advocating for their recognition as beings with rights. It reflects on the urgent need for environmental protection and social justice, proposing a future where humanity respects nature as sacred and interdependent.
Cesarine Bernard
Fallen Foliage
Found objects: branches, dry leaves
An installation inspired by the Triskell symbol—past, present, future, and the elements of earth, water, and fire. Through collected branches and leaves, the work reflects on humans’ place in macro-ecological systems and the impact of displacing natural objects from their environments. It invites viewers to reconsider their relationship with nature, acknowledging other beings’ roles in planetary balance. The installation includes three assembled pieces on a circular support, with sensory elements of smell, smoke, and storytelling.
