Bienal de Pontevedra

In her intervention for the 32nd Pontevedra Biennial, Beatriz Ruibal moves away from the photographic language towards a spatial dimension, by covering the glass cube of the building Pazo da Cultura with an enlarged image of an olive leaf, which acts as a second skin. Found throughout the Mediterranean, the olive tree holds, according to the artist, a deep symbolic meaning, linked to life, resistance and the possibility of regeneration. This tree not only withstands the passage of time and devastation – it is reborn after fire, takes root in harsh soils, and even persists in contexts of neglect or in wartime –, but also keeps in its body a shared memory that goes beyond what is strictly human. In La piel del olivo, that enlarged leaf does not merely cover the building, but transforms it into a living organism, into ‘plant hospitality’, a welcoming place from the plant perspective. Perhaps it is not a matter of representing, Ruibal explains, but of remaining. In a context of eco-social crisis, this intervention suggests the need to reconsider our ways of interacting with the environment and to imagine other slower, more attentive and closer ways of inhabiting the ordinary. The gesture, far from being merely formal or decorative, activates a series of connections between nature, architecture and historical memory, and opens a place of encounter between the vegetal, the human and the constructed. Vinyl transparency transforms the glass cube into a porous body that allows light to pass through and introduces a logic of superimposition, where the image does not delete the real, but complicates it