EL APARTAMENTO: THREE SENSITIVE CARTOGRAPHIES OF THE TROPICAL TERRITORY

The exhibition Tropicália, currently on view at the Madrid headquarters of El Apartamento, proposes a critical and sensorial journey through the tropical landscape, understood both as a visual representation and as a field of perception, memory, and lived experience. Inspired by the thought of Alexander von Humboldt, the exhibition establishes a dialogue between nature and human experience through the interaction of works by María Ana Vasco Costa (Lisbon, Portugal, 1944), Márcio Vilela (Belém do Pará, Brazil, 1981), and Ariamna Contino (Havana, Cuba, 1984).

The exhibition brings together the contemporary practices of these three artists in order to reflect upon the notion of territory. Through their distinct artistic languages and techniques, viewers are invited into an experience in which observation, displacement, and memory converge, enabling a critical reconsideration of the tropical landscape as a cultural, ecological, and historical construct in constant transformation.

The practices of the three artists approach territory from different, yet complementary, perspectives. Vasco Costa develops a pictorial and sculptural practice that records the natural landscape while moving beyond mere representation. Her work enters an affective dimension in which perception, aesthetics, and experience intertwine, expanding the conventional notion of landscape painting.

Working through a distinctly audiovisual language marked by poetic and plastic sensibilities, Márcio Vilela explores the tropical forest through photography and video, emphasizing the perceptual density of the overwhelming natural environment. This is particularly evident in his series Superflora, which translates the complexity of the forest into a visual experience that revisits Humboldt’s conception of landscape as a totalizing experience.

In dialogue with these approaches, Ariamna Contino introduces the landscape as a territory of memory and traditional knowledge through her installation El colector de historia. Across a series of interconnected works, the artist revisits the concept of the manigua — a dense tropical vegetation that can be understood both as a physical space and as a symbolic and cultural construction. Contino privileges this latter dimension, reclaiming the manigua as a site of knowledge that exceeds the exclusively visual realm.

Tropicália will remain on view until August 1, 2026, at El Apartamento, Puebla 4, Madrid, Spain.