From an awareness of travel—of what we carry, lose, or transform along the way—a different way of inhabiting the world may emerge.

Every politics of identity is, in essence, a politics of narrative: who speaks, from where, and in what language. The migrant artist—precarious, displaced, decentered—is no longer an exception, but a structural figure within contemporary art; a witness to shifting borders, invisible archives, and unmapped geographies.

What we once called “form” now reveals itself as surface, a taut skin upon which fragments of history are inscribed. Matter—light, paper, color, image—is never neutral; it speaks through contact, friction, and touch. In this return to the material and the sensorial, a different aesthetic experience emerges: more embodied, slower, uncertain.

The artists presented by Jorge López Galería at ARCO 2026 constitute an unofficial archive, an affective palimpsest that engages peripheral memories, personal narratives, traces, and forms of care rendered invisible or neutralized by history books. They practice a poetics of care—at once a form of resistance—and understand travel not as tourism, but as a displacement of meaning, as critical wandering. In a context where thought dissolves into data and fragile connections, the space of art must render the residual legible, thereby linking history and the present, the intimate and the geopolitical, the global and the vernacular. The gallery thus becomes a narrative space in tension, where the imagined dialogues with the lost, and the image ceases to illustrate in order to pierce.

The artists: Valeria Maculan (Argentina), Álvaro Porras Soriano (Ciudad Real), Miguel Rothschild (Argentina), Inma Femenía (Pego) y Ana Císcar (Valencia)