A World Far Away, Nearby—and Very Much in Miami
El Espacio 23 — “A World Far Away, Nearby and Invisible: Territory Narratives in the Jorge M. Pérez Collection”
Written By Olga Garcia-Mayoral
On view: November 20, 2025 – August 15, 2026 • Free to the public
El Espacio 23’s new show opens like a compass unfolding. Step through the warehouse doors in Allapattah and the air changes—cool, cavernous, charged—then your eyes begin to map a terrain that is at once planetary and intimate. “A World Far Away, Nearby and Invisible” is the space’s sixth exhibition and its most expansive meditation to date on a single idea: territory—the ground beneath us and the ground within us.
Curated by Claudia Segura Campins (Head of Collection at MACBA) in dialogue with EE23 curators Patricia Hanna and Anelys Alvarez, the exhibition brings together nearly 150 works by over 100 artists from the Americas, Europe, Africa, and beyond. It is international in scope and exacting in structure, a show that asks you to walk, look, and then re-walk as meanings accrue.
Founder Jorge M. Pérez frames the ambition succinctly: the aim is to spark discussion, reflection, and cross-cultural connection. In an era when identity and belonging are under pressure everywhere, the exhibition treats territory not as a static map but as a living force—shaped by history, memory, and imagination. Segura Campins underscores the timeliness: her first exhibition of this scale in the U.S. examines how boundaries and perspectives shift across worldviews, amplifying territory’s double nature as both primordial and symbolic. The curatorial team’s approach is resolutely plural; the four-part layout functions like a field guide to how artists record, contest, and re-enchant place.
The Pulse: Earth as Agent
The opening movement, The Pulse, approaches the planet as a body with agency—geology as memory, minerals as archive, landscape as a slow exhalation. The premise is elegant: to feel territory, first you must slow down. Works by Pat Steir, Teresa Solar, and Mungo Thomson (among others) explore biological vitality and the invisible energies that structure life. In this register, rock strata become timelines, fault lines become sign lines, and elements behave like characters rather than backdrops. The sensation is bracing: you are not looking at land; land is looking back.
Landscapes in the Making: Unlearning the View
Turn a corner and the horizon tilts. Landscapes in the Making unthreads the colonial habits embedded in the European landscape tradition—a fixed vantage point; a surveyed, possessable “nature.” Artists here reclaim landscape as a political and cultural category, integrating spiritual and ancestral relations to land while dismantling the old perspectival certainties. Instead of neat vistas, you get palimpsests, counter-maps, and methodical refusals of the “single view.”
The roster is sharp and telling: Chantal Peñalosa, Dalton Gata, Sandra Gamarra, Roberto Huarcaya, Rember Yahuarcani. Their works do not replace one doctrine with another; they reopen the category so dreams, memory, and community knowledge can circulate again. You begin to sense the show’s thesis in motion: territory is not just where we stand; it is how we stand there.
Whispers from the Land: Cosmologies at the Threshold
A change in temperature—of color, of pacing—ushers you into Whispers from the Land, where territory is treated as a living, generative body interlacing human, natural, and spiritual realms. Drawing from Indigenous cosmologies, artists portray beings that blur species and scale. Works by Yann Gerstberger, Sandra Vásquez de la Horra, Ravelle Pillay, and Chris Ofili embrace hybridity and porosity. The effect is not escapist fantasy but a recalibration of attention: a reminder that place is also ritual, that soil is story, that the line between the “organic” and the “imaginary” is often an imposition rather than a truth. Here, territory becomes a vessel for memory and transformation, an invisible commons we carry and that carries us.
Shelter Among the Scars: Wound, Refuge, Return
The final section, Shelter Among the Scars, faces extractive violence squarely—mining, clear-cutting, the industrial despoliations that fracture both land and life. Yet it refuses a rhetoric of despair. Works by Dora Longo Bahía, Nohemí Pérez, Mohau Modisakeng, and others dwell in the tension between destruction and resilience, tracing how grief can metabolize into strength. The earth appears as both transit and protection, a site where wounds become refuges. The curatorial pacing is deft: the show doesn’t end with a period so much as with a breath, a pause from which futures might be spoken.
A Local Thread: Miami Artists, Miami Public
Beyond its global reach, the exhibition also makes a Miami-specific promise. For the first time in a public institutional setting, EE23 features local artists Nina Surel and Jennifer Basile, signaling a commitment to nurturing the city’s ecosystem alongside the international conversation. That attention to home base matters. The show is free to the public, and its thematic territory—lands lived, contested, and cared for—takes on particular acuity in a city built on layers of migration, climate precarity, and cultural synthesis.
Curatorial Method: Four Lenses, One Field
What keeps this large exhibition coherent is the precision of its four-section architecture. Each chapter takes a stance—earth’s agency; decolonial mapping; cosmological kinship; resilience in the face of extraction—yet all four share a signal intuition: territory is active. It acts on bodies and beliefs; it demands accountability; it remembers. The installation uses this reciprocity as a design principle. Sightlines open across chapters so you glimpse a basalt surface from the “Pulse” while standing among dream-figures in “Whispers,” or catch a cartographic gesture in “Landscapes” that reappears as a scar’s geometry in “Shelter.” The result is a mesh of correspondences rather than a linear march.
Segura Campins’ international curatorial experience shows in the show’s dialogic feel—works from different regions are not token “representatives” but partners in argument. In parallel, the in-house perspectives of Hanna and Alvarez keep the exhibition grounded in EE23’s ethos: a collection used not as a trophy chest but as a public engine for conversation. As Hanna notes, following “Mirror of the Mind,” which centered the individual, this turn to territory broadens the frame without losing emotional stakes. References to artists such as Leonora Carrington, Tania Candiani, and Graciela Sacco situate the show along axes of cultural memory, spiritual connection, and resilience—exactly where Miami’s audiences live.
Reading the Title
The title’s cadence—far away, nearby, invisible—isn’t coy; it’s a set of instructions. Far away: territory as geologic deep time and transcontinental flow. Nearby: the plot, the neighborhood, the city as daily choreography of belonging. Invisible: the forces underneath—law, myth, extraction; the ancestral and the atmospheric; the things that bind without being seen. The exhibition moves fluidly among these registers, asking you to hold all three at once.
How to Walk It
Walk slowly. Choose a section and loop back. Let materials lead: inks that feel like groundwater; pigments that settle like dust; videos where the frame behaves like a shoreline; sculptures that carry the weight of ore and the memory of hands. Read the wall text, then look again. This show rewards circulation—your own and the art’s.
For educators and program-makers, the exhibition offers multiple entry points: environmental humanities, Indigenous knowledge and cosmologies, decolonial art history, cartography, and community design. For general audiences, it provides something rarer: permission to feel the land—to think with it, not just about it.
Why It Matters Now
In Miami, territory is not theoretical. It’s the Biscayne aquifer, king tides, a mangrove’s quiet engineering; it’s apartment leases and climate migration; it’s neighborhoods renamed, reclaimed, or erased. To stage an exhibition that treats territory as agent and archive is to give the city a way to see itself—beyond real estate, beyond fatalism. “A World Far Away, Nearby and Invisible” doesn’t solve anything (that’s not art’s job), but it does something art can uniquely do: it changes how you pay attention. And attention, as any urban planner or community organizer will tell you, is the beginning of policy, care, and change.
As you exit, the show’s four chapters keep echoing: pulse, making, whispers, shelter. They don’t line up as a slogan; they resound as a practice. If you carry them back into the city—onto the Metrorail, across the causeway, into classrooms and kitchens—the exhibition has done its work. Territory, it suggests, is not only where you are. It is how you relate. Here, now, together, in Miami.A World Far Away, Nearby—and Very Much in Miami
