Isabel Servera. “Alenades”

Isabel Servera’s works create their own habitat at the Miró. They colonise Space Zero and engage in dialogue both with the omnipresent spirit of Joan Miró and his work, and with the space conceived to house his foundation in Mallorca. They expand like unique, rocky and vegetal formations at once, in a symbiotic relationship to represent the figurative scenography of a cave, a shelter that houses two groups of works: the so-called “Vetleria” and the “Alenades”.

Alenar in Mallorcan is to fill the body with oxygen by drawing in air and expelling it through the same passage, repeatedly, following a constant pattern, a rhythm. The sculptures, organic in nature, could well be the material translation of the act that, in inhaling and exhaling, transforms the external into the internal and vice versa. In fact, these works are titled “Alenades” (breaths). They silently incorporate the rhythm of machine sewing, accompanied by the body, as the hands guide the palm towards the needle that pierces the leather. A rhythmic movement which, when repeated corporally, becomes a musical instrument, also when it interacts with other elements involved in the working process.

The artist occupies and inhabits their godmother’s workshop in an experimental exercise of reappropriating craft techniques. It connects with the family tradition of Artà, while at the same time breaking from it through the creation of a unique language, without established patterns, that evokes the sonic dimension of work in ancestral practices (tunes, glosses and songs resonate) through silence.

The palm fronds find a perfect symbiosis with the marès pieces. A poetics of the objet trouvé (in the manner of Miró) leads the creator to reuse the blocks and slabs found on site. Some are remnants of the site’s construction and others are pedestals from the Miró sculptural park, now disused. Once recycled, they function mimeticallly as deconstructed columns. They inexorably evoke the architecture conceived for this museum by Rafael Moneo and, by extension, the island’s building tradition. The “Alenades” have colonised the marshland to form a kind of stalagmite, which behave almost like a green plant, in search of the sustainability of their own ecosystem.

Before the sewing machine made a comeback, tin-sheet manufacturing involved preparing the material and then weaving the sheets, braiding them. A task that is often carried out collectively through oral transmission of the vetleries. These gatherings, predominantly female, are meeting points for sharing knowledge and stories; also songs. The repetition of sounds and gestures becomes prayer, mantra, breathing. A rhythm that Isabel transforms into a fluid materiality, contrasted with the apparent asperity of the dried palm fronds.

Returning to the cave conceived specifically for the Fundació Miró, the suspended, hand-woven esparto strips that form part of the piece “Vetleria” would be its stalactites. The work incorporates the collaborative effort of braiding by many hands, who have left behind part of the physical effort involved in transforming the material and part of the care required to shape it. Once again, from the silence, the piece calls upon the voices of all who are present, and of those who are not, but do so through the others.

The materialisation of silence is entrusted to the subtlety of Joana Gomila, who has also interwoven tradition and contemporaneity in the soundscape that forms part of the exhibition.

Alenar (Breathing) is also resting. Taking a breath is pausing to carry on, in Isabel Servera’s artistic practice; to become aware of one’s personal and family positioning within a community, in the collective becoming that connects us to one another, in an infinite chain of gestures that repeat in a cosmic rhythm.

Pilar Rubí.Exhibition Commissioner.

Biografia

Isabel Servera (Mallorca, 1986) is a Mallorcan visual artist based in Barcelona. Her artistic practice focuses on manual processes of repetition, accumulation and work routines, establishing a dialogue between contemporary art and craft processes.

Through installations, sculptures and textile works, she investigates the relationship between the body, the territory and matter. Her practice connects the intimate with the collective, exploring popular knowledge, intergenerational transmission and the poetic dimension of materials. She is particularly interested in working with techniques linked to traditional craftsmanship and ancestral knowledge, understanding them as spaces of memory, affect and identity. Her work explores the tensions between tradition and contemporaneity, and situates the craft gesture as a space for transmission and transformation.

She has a Bachelor of Fine Arts and a Master’s in Artistic Production and Research from the University of Barcelona, and has furthered her training in tapestry and textile arts at the School for Women of the Provincial Council of Barcelona.

She has exhibited in various national and international museums, art centres and galleries, such as: the IVAM – Valencian Institute of Modern Art (Valencia, 2026), the Palau de la Música Catalana (Barcelona, 2026), the iGallery (Palma de Mallorca, 2026), ARCOmadrid (Madrid, 2024), Drawing Room Lisbon (Portugal, 2023), the Palau de Casavells (Girona, 2023), Studio Weil (Puerto de Andraitx, Mallorca, 2022), Alzueta Gallery (Barcelona, 2020), Can Framis Museum – Vila Casas Foundation (Barcelona, 2019), Hilvaria Studio (Hilvarenbeek, the Netherlands, 2015), the Es Baluard Museum of Contemporary Art in Palma (2014), Muu Galleria (Helsinki, Finland, 2014) and the L.A.C – Lieu de Art Contemporain (Sigean, France, 2013), among others.

In 2023, they received the Barbara H. Weil Award, which enabled them to undertake an artist residency in New York. Her work is held in public and private collections such as the Vila Casas Foundation, the City Council of Palma, the Banco Sabadell Foundation, the DKV Collection, the Art Fund of the Addaya Centre of Contemporary Art, and the Piet Moget – L.A.C Narbonne Collection, among others.