Following the Sun: blanca arias: At the Edge of a Forest, a Girl

‘At the edge of a forest, a girl.’ There is a promise, from teller to listener, concealed in that opening, like a note tucked into a pocket, a hint that something is about to happen. Anyone in the vicinity would turn their head and prick their ears, their mind already forming a picture of the girl, perhaps picking her way through trees or standing beside the green wall of a forest. —Excerpt from Hamnet, by Maggie O’Farrell

It is with this horizon of expectation that At the Edge of a Forest, a Girl unfolds. Taking the apparent voids in Antoni Tàpies’ Mitjó [Sock] as her starting point, blanca arias invites us to inhabit the hole as an ambiguous space: absence and openness, vulnerability and possibility. That which decorum usually casts aside — excess, the abject, deviation from the norm — becomes here a place for rethinking the perception of bodies and what our gaze says about us.

In this context, body and matter are presented as surfaces for writing, conveying what words cannot express. As an act of methodological care, arias ‘pulls the thread’, symbolically linking textile practices, oral memory and discreet genealogies that are often left out of the official narrative.

From a feminist perspective, intuition and listening to the soft areas of the body are claimed here as forms of knowledge. Poetry, conceived as a fold in language, opens up spaces where other meanings emerge and allows us to question what we expect from the artistic experience today.

Activity held as part of the 2026 edition of the Following the Sun serie at the Museu Tàpies.