The term ruderal (from the Latin ruderalis) refers to resilient flora that thrives in environments altered by human activity, capable of spreading easily, producing many seeds, and adapting to diverse conditions. In botany, the term ruderalis is used to designate species commonly known as weeds or invasive plants.

This project gathers plants, flowers, roots, seeds, and other forms of vegetation that have culturally acquired connotations associated with dissidence: dangerous, foreign, non-productive... They have also been historically linked to rituals of encounters between alterities—magic, covens, alchemy, love spells, bacchanals, journeys...

In this case, Montjuïc Mountain in Barcelona serves as the main site of research. Generally, the peripheral or marginal areas of the city become the places where encounters displaced from the public sphere or beyond control take place. In Barcelona, Montjuïc represents that suspended landscape at night, where activities take advantage of darkness and the absence of gazes to unfold autonomously, asserting their own identity.

Ruderalis is a gathering of all these customs, rituals, and traditions that naturally emerge within dissidence, playing with the metaphor of the plants themselves that grow spontaneously. When symbolically relocated into the gallery space, they acquire the condition of narrative objects—altars, archives, or relics of cultural value—that foster uncertainty and distance from the hegemonic narrative.

She was unable to remember the shape of the pool. She asked her sisters for help so they could try to describe what it was like. She also asked her father if he could draw it. A shape begins to appear: straight edges, marked lines and symmetry, with no rounded areas. This exercise of memory is the first gesture that encourages the artist Krystel Liliana to produce a series of pieces that respond to the idea of reconstructing and materializing images stored in memory.

In Krystel’s artistic practice, wax is the main material that gives form to her works. In this exhibition we encounter it in different formats and surfaces: as a support for images —where the material itself acts as a veil over the photograph, making it diffuse and affecting its sharpness—. Wax also becomes structure and object; elements associated with a house, with summer, appear rescaled: such as a swimming pool that we could hold with two hands or a swimsuit that contains an invisible body. Water functions as a connecting element throughout the exhibition, linking forms and spaces, operating as a deep layer that has left a trace.

Alongside these wax works, several objects are also presented that add new layers of meaning and readings to the exhibition. One particular element is the filing cabinet, which shelters what is inside and refers us to the act of remembering and collecting. The scale and position of the pieces we find here allow us to look into them, as if we were delving into memory, or to contemplate them from afar, in an exercise of recognition and connection with something we have seen before, but brought into this exhibition as a kind of sequence or frame that we access little by little.

Two intentions thus emerge during Krystel’s process: remembering and making present —or bringing presence— through images transformed into objects of different scales that dialogue with each other. An archaeology of memory: the house, adjoining rooms, photographs, spaces and movements. All of this crossed by a constant sensation of distortion, of inaccessibility, like an image that never fully becomes clear.