Exhibition Text
by Chus Martínez

Wetlands: A Woman in the Company of Other Women

Wetness is an in-between state, a way of being both on land and in water. Existing between two realms is a condition shared by millions of beings—human and non-human alike. It is a condition that compels us to define life and behavior differently.
Paula Santomé's work maintains a relationship of friction with history and its unfulfilled promises. Her practice occupies a position that no longer fully believes in narratives of progress, yet refuses to abandon them altogether. It works from a place of fatigue, from the awareness that equality has been proclaimed time and again only to be endlessly deferred. From this displacement, her work inhabits techniques and visual languages associated with the past—metal repoussé, leaded stained glass, and monochrome drawing—not as a nostalgic gesture, but as a way of intervening in the visual structures that have shaped the representation of the female body. In this sense, her work not only recovers images but also questions the regimes of looking that have historically sustained them.

The conditions imposed by gender operate in much the same way. Being a woman should not be regarded as a burden, yet it is clear that it demands a different kind of effort and disposition in order to attain a socially acceptable degree of recognition.
Indeed, we have entirely lost the notion of the Great Goddess—that figure capable of representing the unity between humanity and nature—and have instead built our societies and our world around the Father. God the Father, who today is experiencing a revival that many of us hope will be the last, like someone waiting for water to turn into wine.

In this exhibition, Paula Santomé asks whether, rather than merely reflecting on that distant past in which the Great Goddess once existed, we might instead search for her and make her present once again, using images, the body, and sculptural practices to open up other ways of understanding ourselves and our relationship with what surrounds us.

The exhibition—Wetlands—takes its title from Coroza, one of the works produced for the show, in which a woman weaves a traditional Galician rain cape to protect herself from the rain. This task embodies a form of knowledge grounded in adaptation to the environment rather than its domination. In Galicia, rain is not an exception but a condition, and this practical knowledge, historically associated with women, becomes the point of departure for the exhibition as a whole.

Like creation myths, the exhibition begins by naming an ecosystem that exists in a place that is a thousand worlds at once. Wetness is a condition that calls for the acceptance of intermediate states.

In one of my favorite books, Queer Ancient Ways, the Chinese historian Zairong Xiang develops a reading of various cosmologies—primarily Mesopotamian and Nahua—through divine figures who embody a non-dualist ontology of matter: Tiamat, Apsu, Coatlicue, and Tlaltecuhtli. Within the Mesopotamian tradition, Tiamat appears as a primordial deity identified with the salt sea, co-generating the cosmos together with Apsu, the fresh waters. Her body is not merely a natural element, but the very medium of creation itself.

Zairong Xiang argues that water constitutes the great material and ontological matrix of culture, and that through it these cultures—and our own rural cultures—learned to think philosophically; they learned to understand the importance of sustaining and inhabiting intermediate states.

In Wetlands, Paula Santomé proposes a continuity between body and landscape—the wetland as both territory and bodily interior—where hybrid forms (human/animal, organic/material) evoke a non-dualist ontology. Santomé's sculptures and reliefs can therefore be read as contemporary reactivations of these figures: not as direct representations, but as transformed survivals of an imaginary in which matter, the body, and the symbolic remain inseparably intertwined. The wetland functions not only as an image, but also as a model for action and thought.

The exhibition Wetlands is structured around a new family of works produced in 2026, through which Santomé explores techniques that have long been central to her practice, such as metal repoussé, now on a much larger scale than in previous works, while also engaging—almost for the first time—with cast aluminum sculpture. In these pieces, the surface—particularly in the repoussé works—acts as an unstable field of light and reflection, where the image never appears as fixed but instead emerges and shifts in relation to the viewer.