The Garden of Insurrection
Marcela Catuária
Commissioner: Aldones Nino
Location: Council House, Arévalo
From 3 to 29 March 2026
Collegium, Marquesa Gallery and Arévalo City Council collaborate.
Marcela Cantuária presents the exhibition The Garden of the Insurrection in the House of the Council of Arévalo, a building that, since 1519, was the seat of municipal power and space historically linked to functions of control and detention, and that today functions as a cultural center and place of citizen meeting. By inscribing his artistic practice in this space historically marked by trials and silencing, Cantuária carries out an exercise of invocation: he reactivates suspended histories and reinscribes, in the institutional context, that which was systematically erased. The exhibition creates a space for confrontation between political violence, its control mechanisms and the affirmation of dissident voices. In this field, the image emerges as an act of symbolic appearance and reparation in the face of a concrete historical violence.
The Thirteen Roses, young anti-Franco militants executed in 1939, in the first months of the dictatorship of Francisco Franco. Detained in the context of the post-war mass arrests, they were shot as part of a policy of institutionalized terror. By eliminating these bodies, the regime sought to disrupt lineages of thought, organizational networks, and future horizons, producing a pedagogy of fear inscribed both in the collective memory and in the surviving bodies. It is against this systematic erasure that Marcela Cantuária created fourteen unpublished works for this specific context. The set includes thirteen individual portraits, dedicated to each of the young women. And The Garden of Insurrection, which establishes a relational field where personal narratives come together in a shared memory. These paintings are devices to invoke and re-inscribe the presence of young women, celebrating their interrupted singularities and their historical strength.
In The Garden of Insurrection, the Thirteen Roses emerge as heads sprouting in the form of flowers on a tree that is configured as a presence in permanent transformation. The trunk, girded by a snake, symbolizes the cycles of death and rebirth, understood here as a vital and political force. Between gravestones, memory stands as a composition in which all break in and re-enact, affirming life where oblivion was intended. The notion of garden moves away from any idea of order or domestication, where memory grows unruly. In the cracks of silence, this garden expands on the margins of the official story and makes the wound in possibility of life. Nature and history are intertwined as forces, affirming that every living memory is itself an act of insurrection.
By occupying a building with a past linked to the administration of the control, Marcela Cantuária thus completes a cycle of resignification, effecting a displacement towards a territory of critical reactivation. The artist rescues narratives by affirming the painting as an act of invocation and inviting a new look on history, in which it can be actively transformed.
In memory of and in tribute to: Carmen Barrero Aguado, Martina Barroso García, Blanca Brisac Vázquez, Pilar Bueno Ibáñez, Julia Conesa Conesa, Adelina García Casillas, Elena Gil Olaya, Virtudes González García, Ana López Gallego, Joaquina López Laffite, Dionisia Manzanero Salas, Victoria Muñoz García, Luisa Rodríguez de la Fuente and Antonia Torre Yela.
Commissioner: Aldones Nino