The BIBLI Gallery is hosting the exhibition “Landscape, Memory, and Power,” part of the Focus section of the International Photography Biennial Fotonoviembre 2025. The exhibition, which runs from November 7 to December 12, features works by artists Teresa Arozena, María Laura Benavente, Adalberto Benítez, Gonzalo González, José Herrera, Manuel López Ruiz, Manuel Martín González, Néstor Torrens, and Sergio Acosta.
The image of the landscape is revealed here not as a transparent mirror of nature, but as a territory laden with memories, tensions, and meanings. The exhibition proposes a revisiting of this concept through paintings, photographs, sculptures, and installations that question its representation and unfold its multiple symbolic dimensions. More than a matter of appearance, the landscape emerges as a cultural framework traversed by historical, political, social, and environmental dynamics.
The assembled pieces show how the territory has been shaped both by human action and by the narratives that interpret and legitimize it, generating friction between nature and artifice, contemplation and exploitation, memory and transformation. The landscape is understood here as a field of dispute, where material and symbolic interests intersect, and where it becomes necessary to question the ways in which we inhabit, intervene in, and represent our environment.
In turn, the exhibition addresses the image of the landscape in relation to three perspectives: that of the viewer, who projects imaginaries onto what is contemplated; that of the image producer, who defines framing and narratives; and that of the exhibitor, who organizes and conditions its reception. These mediations reveal that the landscape is never offered to us as immediate evidence, but rather as a construction made of choices, silences, and strategies of visibility.
Hence, what we see in the landscape cannot be assumed to be pure truth: its image is not a reflection, but a discourse, an artifice that produces reality while simultaneously representing it. Thus, this exhibition invites us to think of the landscape not only as a setting, but as a critical device for the production of meaning, a place where the relationships between territory, power and gaze are constantly negotiated.