VULNERABILITY AS RESISTANCE: ELA FIDALGO EXHIBITS AT MARC BIBILONI IN MADRID
On the occasion of Gallery Weekend / Apertura Madrid, Marc Bibiloni inaugurated Fragmento Ausente, a new solo exhibition by Ela Fidalgo (Palma de Mallorca, 1993), one of the most distinctive artists of her generation. Her practice, intertwining painting, embroidery, installation, and textile sculpture, challenges disciplinary boundaries and positions itself in a fertile zone of linguistic contamination. Following the success of her exhibition at Casal Solleric in Mallorca — the most visited in the history of the institution — Fidalgo now presents in Madrid a project that combines intimacy and politics, transforming the gallery into a space that is both refuge and manifesto.
Fragmento Ausente explores themes of identity, memory, and contemporary fragility through textiles, sounds, and embroidered words, constructing a territory where softness confronts hardness, tenderness takes on the value of a political gesture against indifference, and each work emerges as an act of resistance and compassion. The artist’s practice, grounded in the use of fabrics, embroidery, acrylics, and waxes, places the body and emotion at its core and distances itself from academic conventions, making imperfection not a limitation but a generative principle of truth and creativity. Her work, included in collections such as the Fundación María Cristina Masaveu Peterson, Fundación Mario Losantos, the Kells Collection, and Fundación Studiolo, has been exhibited at institutions including La Térmica in Málaga, Casal Solleric in Mallorca, and in galleries across Germany, Denmark, and Switzerland.
The exhibition unfolds as an immersive journey into interiority, a dialogue on identity that, in today’s turbulent context, also becomes a mirror of our collective fractures. Fidalgo transforms the exhibition space into a resonant territory where the visitor confronts what is most resiliently human: fear, loss, compassion, vulnerability. Through textile installations, soft sculptures, embroidery, and sound pieces, the artist composes a landscape suspended between intimacy and politics, made up of fabrics floating in space, monumentally scaled sewn heads, embroidered flags with fragmented phrases, and oversized hands inviting touch, generating an experience in which fragility asserts itself as a resistant force.
The structure of the exhibition assumes the form of a material diary, with embroidered pages that safeguard intimate thoughts, textile bodies that exceed the limits of the frame, and symbolic architectures evoking fallen walls and open thresholds. Each work becomes a testimony to the struggle to preserve humanity in the face of contemporary cynicism. Immersive soundscapes, created in collaboration with Strange Bound, accompany the textile works and intensify the multisensory dimension of the experience, which is not limited to observation but fully engages the body, in a passage oscillating between the sacred and the everyday, between refuge and disquiet.
Ultimately, Fragmento Ausente stands as a poetic manifesto against oblivion and indifference, a place where the imperfect, the unfinished, and the vulnerable are transformed into sources of beauty and truth. The exhibition can be visited at Marc Bibiloni Gallery, Calle Divino Vallés 12, Arganzuela, Madrid, open to the public on Thursdays and Fridays from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. and on Saturdays from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m.
