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MY MIND IS NOT A CAGE

 

 

The body that runs through this exhibition does not close itself into a form, nor does it allow itself to be captured by an image. Like the mind evoked in the title — My mind is not a cage — the body here is not containment, but passage. It is not a limit, but an open, permeable territory, in constant displacement. A body that does not settle, that continually redefines itself in relation to space, time, and what crosses through it. 

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The works brought together are by eleven artists from different geographies, each carrying distinct experiences, cultures, and perspectives. This diversity intensifies the body as a plural territory, traversed by voices, gestures, and memories that intersect and respond to one another, offering multiple ways of perceiving, sensing, and inhabiting. 

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At a time that insists on the return of the figure as a promise of recognition and stability, these works choose refusal. They refuse the body as a stable image, as a legible identity, as a surface of projection. Instead, they allow a body made of intensities to emerge — fragmented, expanded, at times absent, at times excessive. A body that approaches the body without organs of Deleuze and Guattari, where form gives way to flow and meaning remains in motion. 

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Video, installation, photography, sculpture, drawing, sound, and site-specific practices activate the body beyond its physical limits. The body expands into space, infiltrates architecture, and merges with the temporality of experience. As Merleau-Ponty suggested, perception is born from the body: we see with it, we listen with our skin, we inhabit space as one who is, in turn, inhabited by it. Experience ceases to be merely visual and becomes sensory, immersive, unstable. 

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Sound emerges as a sensitive material, occupying the place where the image dissolves or refuses itself. Sculpture insists on weight, friction, and the resistance of matter. Photography suspends the gesture without fixing it. Drawing approaches thought in motion, the line as hesitation and impulse. Site-specific work summons the place as an extension of the body, reminding us that there is no neutral territory, no body without marks, no presence without context. 

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This body-territory is also political. A body traversed by norms, by histories inscribed on the skin, and by apparatuses of control — as Foucault reminds us — but also a body that resists, that slips away, and reinvents itself. A body that does not close in on itself, remaining in constant negotiation with what surrounds it, what conditions it, and what transforms it. 

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My mind is not a cage thus echoes as a refusal of confinement and an opening to possibility. The body is not a prison, nor is the mind a cage. Both exist as permeable territories, crossed by forces, silences, and affects. Between artwork, space, and those who move through, the body happens — not as figure, but as lived experience, in continuous becoming. 

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And, for an instant, the body becomes a breeze moving through space, a shadow touching the wall, a silence folding in on itself, a presence that escapes and spreads, leaving behind a trace that can only be felt, never captured. 

 

 

 

Mercedes Cerón, January 2026

Catarina Pedroso, co-curator