South Body: Carlos Martiel (2025)
Centre del Carme Cultura Contemporània, Valencia, Spain.
October 2, 2025 – January 11, 2026

Colonialism cannot be understood as a phenomenon of the past, but rather as a persistent structure that continues to shape power relations in the present. Far from disappearing, colonialism has the capacity to metamorphose into new configurations of domination, reproducing itself through subtle or concealed forms that permeate both the structures of the global economy and the most intimate spheres of everyday life, shaping desires, imaginaries, and modes of existence. In this context, racialized bodies embody these colonial continuities in particularly visible ways, as they are subjected to regimes of surveillance, exclusion, and precarity that reveal hierarchies inherited from imperial logic.

Within this framework, the work of Carlos Martiel (Havana, Cuba, 1989) is grounded in the force of a body that embodies multiple layers of history and displacement. To be a Black, Latin American migrant artist living in the United States means inhabiting a crossroads marked by colonial memory, exile, and racialization. His body does not appear on stage as a neutral surface, but as a presence that condenses tensions between belonging and exclusion, freedom and subjugation, visibility and silence. Martiel transforms this condition into an aesthetic and political language that has defined his practice since its beginnings.

This exhibition is curated by Adonay Bermúdez and produced by the Consorci de Museus de la Comunitat Valenciana.