Fundación Caja Extremadura presents, in its space at the 44th International Fair of Contemporary Art ARCO2025, in Madrid, one of the winning works from its annual art competition—the video “Mimicking the birds mimicking the waves” by artist Maider López—within the “Obra Abierta” program, curated by YGBART (Lucía Ybarra and Rosina Gómez-Baeza).
Maider López‘s work challenges our notions of the “frontier”, proposing trans-scalar and interspecies structures through mimesis and imitation. She invites us to play with boundaries, testing small accidents that, without intervention, seem to be rigid physical and conceptual barriers. In the video, a simple choreography appears to engage in dialogue with one of these limits, encouraging an exploration of how far transformation is possible. López has developed some of her most renowned works on a landscape scale, employing spatial transformation processes and modifications of use closely related to architecture.
The design of Fundación Caja Extremadura’s space at ARCO2025, created by Ángel Borrego Cubero / OSS, is an interplay of planes and volumes that mimics the way people “test” the waves in Maider López’s video. It invites the visitors of the fair to interact through a choreography that mirrors the one in the video. It forms a landscape where Fundación Caja Extremadura reinterprets itself and engages visitors, inviting them to discover future collaborative activities.
The Fundación’s presence at ARCO2025 is conceived as a spatial experiment: it showcases a single artwork while also pointing to the archive of the “Obra Abierta” collection. The design and choice of materials blur the boundary between storage and exhibition, suggesting that the artwork is part of an archive, a process, and a broader activity.
The scenography created for Fundación Caja Extremadura invites visitors to share their interpretation of the concept of ‘frontier,’ a term that, in some way, also defines the Spanish region of Extremadura, which borders Portugal. Recorded testimonies from visitors would later be displayed within the space itself.