Josune Urrutia Asua. Drawn Thought Curated by Marc Charles and Luz Verdaguer. In collaboration with Festival Patac.

“Josune Urrutia. Drawn Thought” presents in detail and in a highly visual way the work processes that have shaped the author’s creative corpus from Breve diccionario enciclopédico ilustrado de MI cáncer to Hoy no es el día. The exhibition focuses on creation within artistic residencies as essential and enabling spaces. Based on residencies held in Bilbao, Lleida, and Angoulême, it offers a journey through the research and artistic practice of her work, highlighting the potential of drawing and comics as tools for investigation, understanding, and sharing.

For Josune Urrutia, drawing is thinking with the body; it is a way of processing complex experiences and constructing visual narratives that connect individual experience with the collective dimension. Drawing allows her to explore pain, illness, care, and resistance from a poetic, epistemological, and critical perspective.

After being diagnosed with ovarian cancer at the age of 33, Urrutia embarked on a creative path that has become a vital commitment: “We need to talk about illness in a way that is not paternalistic,” she says in a conversation with author Sloane Leong. Her work stems from the need to share the experience of illness through art, to reframe it, and to give it meaning. Projects such as the Collective Compendium on Cancer exemplify this desire to transform pain into shared knowledge, with active participation from the hospital community.

Inspired by figures such as Audre Lorde, Susan Sontag, and Jo Spence, Urrutia explores how cancer transforms life and how art can serve as a response, memory, and form of resistance. “Fragility and vulnerability are strengths,” she says, advocating for drawing as a tool to connect with one’s own needs, to narrate from the core, and to give voice to what often remains silent.