Eulàlia Rovira

Through sculpture, video, spoken word, photography and performance, Eulàlia Rovira’s meticulous practice has explored a range of fields, including perception, etymology and archaeology. Her recent projects have evoked presences beyond our field of vision—forces behind our eyes, for example, as elucidated by the protagonist of her video The Eye’s Speech (2019), a retina that mumbles to itself—or presences beneath our feet—as in the exhibition Esmorteir l’esmorteït (2020), in which photographs of paving slabs were juxtaposed with four large wooden struts fixed to the roof trusses of a gallery by means of ratchet straps. None of the timbers quite touched the ground; they gracefully punctuated the space yet were structurally unnecessary, calling our attention to the subsurface and the thin separation between life and death. Her performance for camera A Knot Which Is Not (2021) was set in an empty exhibition space and wove narratives around the work environment and the mechanical sounds of the venue’s industrial past while speculating on the conversations of the women who worked there as they performed their repetitive manual tasks.