Alejandra España – Built and Lived Continuity
Built and Lived Continuity presents new works by Mexican artist Alejandra España, created during a three month residency at 68projects by KORNFELD in Berlin. Curated by Tereza de Arruda, the exhibition brings together works on paper, collages and installations that examine how places, memories and histories shape our perception of the world.
Taking Berlin as a starting point, España responds to the city’s visible layers of history, its breaks between East and West, and its ongoing processes of reconstruction and change. Hand dyed papers, translucent colour fields and overlapping fragments create images that move between landscape and abstraction, suggesting maps, geological formations and urban structures. In these works, the city appears not as something finished, but as a continuous interplay of past, present and future.
The exhibition Built and Lived Continuity has been developed in collaboration with CAM Gallery, Mexico City, and is the result of a three-month residency by the Mexican artist Alejandra España at 68projects by KORNFELD in Berlin between April and June. Curated by Tereza de Arruda, the presentation brings together new works created during this intensive working period, which for the first time connect España’s long-term artistic research with the lived realities of Berlin.
The residency not only defines the temporal framework of the exhibition, but also constitutes its actual point of departure: the new works are directly shaped by the artist’s time in Berlin. The city becomes a central source of inspiration, its atmosphere and impressions resonating in each work.
During her stay, España engaged deeply with the city’s distinctive historical and spatial fabric. As an artist from Mexico, she approaches Berlin with an unencumbered gaze. Historical ruptures, the visible strata of the city, and the simultaneity of remembrance and transformation become starting points for an artistic inquiry into place and identity. The visible breaks between East and West, urban voids, traces of political transformation, and the coexistence of reconstruction and perpetual change all emerged as key observations in her practice.
Above all, the experience of how Berlin does not conceal its history, but rather renders it legible as an open layering within the urban space, has left a lasting mark on these new works. In this process of engagement, the artist significantly expands her visual vocabulary. Hand-dyed papers, permeable colour fields and open compositions give rise to pictorial worlds that oscillate between landscape and abstraction, between memory and the present. What at first appears organic may, in the next moment, evoke cartographies, geological formations or urban structures. Past and present, nature and built environment enter into a state of productive indeterminacy.
The starting point of España’s practice is the idea that memory and experience do not constitute a static archive, but a living, constantly shifting process. The exhibition encompasses new works on paper, collages and installations through which she explores cultural notions of origin, landscape and belonging. Her works evolve through the layering of paper, pigment and colour, through the superimposition of fragments, traces and translucent surfaces. She is less concerned with depicting the world than with asking how reality is perceived, stored and remembered in the first place. The exhibition reveals how places inscribe themselves into our consciousness not only geographically, but also emotionally and historically – and how artistic processes can translate such experiences into new visual realms.
For curator Tereza de Arruda, this is the core of España’s practice: “For the artist, everything exists as continuity. Forms grow out of previous forms, experiences sediment into new experiences, and life itself is constructed through overlapping layers.”
In this sense, Built and Lived Continuity does not regard the city as a finished form, but as an ongoing process. The exhibition makes visible how places come into being: through memory, through material, and through the traces of those who inhabit them. In Alejandra España’s works, Berlin is not merely depicted as an object – it becomes a subject composed of past, present and future.
Alejandra España (1982, Mexico City) is a Mexican visual artist. She studied sculpture and portraiture at Llotja, School of Art and Design in Barcelona, and completed a Fine Arts degree at the National School of Painting, Sculpture and Printmaking “La Esmeralda" (ENPEG) in Mexico. She was a FONCA grantee for ceramic residencies at the Banff Centre (Canada) and in Vallauris (France).
Her work has received numerous distinctions, including the Acquisition Prize of the XIX Tamayo Biennial (2020) and the Palm Foundation Award (2024). Significant artist residencies at Casa Wabi (Mexico) and the Banff Centre (Canada) further mark her career. Most recently, her works have been presented in solo exhibitions at the Franz Mayer Museum and at CAM Gallery in Mexico City. Her works are held in major collections, including the Rufino Tamayo Museum, the Getty Conservation Institute and the Berkowitz Contemporary Foundation.
68projects by KORNFELD, the international project and residency space of KORNFELD Galerie in Berlin-Charlottenburg, offers a dynamic platform for artists from around the world. With a focus on global dialogue, 68projects fosters cultural exchange and serves as a laboratory for new artistic positions and curatorial experiments. In this way, it creates a unique place of encounter and exchange between international artists, curators, collectors and the art-engaged Berlin public.
