THREADS OF MEMORY – Textile & Ceramics

THREADS OF MEMORY — Textile & Ceramics brings together Brazilian artist Alex Rocca and Ivorian artist Médéric Turay in a dialogue between two materially distinct yet conceptually resonant practices. Through textile and ceramics, the artists explore how matter can carry memory, register the body and become a vehicle for transmission, identity and transformation.

At the heart of the show is a shared refusal to treat material as passive support. Fibre, clay, metal, glass, pigment and found elements are activated through repetition, accumulation and touch. They are woven, stitched, bound, painted, layered and assembled until surface becomes structure and object acquires presence. Across both practices, making is inseparable from memory: the hand leaves a trace, and that trace becomes part of the work’s meaning.

Material as Memory

Alex Rocca approaches textile as a living archive. His practice moves between weaving, sculpture and material experimentation, combining cotton, wool, silk and other fibres with brass, copper, glass and ceramics. Repetitive gestures — stitching, perforating, binding, twisting and assembling — accumulate slowly within the work, embedding time and labour into its structure.

Rocca’s research engages with Afro-Brazilian heritage and with Bantu and Yoruba cosmologies, not as a repertoire of fixed symbols, but as part of a broader reflection on ancestry, continuity and the transmission of knowledge. Mantles, shields, masks, ornaments and totemic forms emerge from this process as objects that seem simultaneously protective, ceremonial and sculptural. Their material tension — softness against rigidity, fragility against weight — gives them a bodily and architectural presence.

In Rocca’s work, textile is therefore never simply fabric. It becomes a space in which gesture is preserved and inherited knowledge is transformed rather than merely repeated.

Ceramics as Body

For Médéric Turay, the exhibition marks a significant development in a visual language that he has built over more than two decades through painting, mixed media and densely worked surfaces. His new sculptural ceramic vessels extend that language into three dimensions, allowing image and object to become inseparable.

Faces, eyes, masks, crowns, signs and organic forms move across the vessels as though inhabiting them. Their necks, curves and vertical silhouettes participate in the construction of the figure, transforming ceramics from support into body. The vessel no longer simply contains: it appears to watch, guard and transmit.

Turay’s surfaces are built through accumulation. Oil, acrylic, walnut ink, pastel, coffee, burlap, collage, copper and other materials generate layers in which forms appear, dissolve and re-emerge. This density gives the works an almost archaeological character, as though images were being recovered from beneath successive strata of experience and memory.

The artist’s recurring statement, “Resist to Exist,” is particularly resonant here. Resistance is not understood solely as confrontation, but as persistence: the ability of a body, an image or a memory to remain visible and continue to speak.

Between Object and Presence

The encounter between Rocca and Turay is strongest at the point where their works cease to behave simply as objects. A textile construction begins to resemble a mantle, shield or guardian; a ceramic vessel becomes a body, face or presence. Both artists operate in this uncertain territory between material form and symbolic charge.

Their approaches are nevertheless fundamentally different. Rocca builds through fibre, tension and repeated manual gesture, while Turay works through volume, skin and the accumulation of imagery. One practice carries memory through structure; the other inscribes it across a surface. Together, they create a dialogue between flexibility and solidity, interior and exterior, protection and exposure.

This relationship also gives the exhibition its title. The “threads” of THREADS OF MEMORY are not only literal fibres. They are lines of continuity: gestures repeated across time, forms inherited and transformed, fragments of knowledge carried from one body or generation to another.

What Materials Remember

Rather than presenting memory as something fixed in the past, THREADS OF MEMORY considers it as an active process. Materials absorb touch, labour and transformation. They can preserve traces while simultaneously allowing those traces to be reorganised into new forms.

Across Rocca’s sculptural textiles and Turay’s ceramic bodies, ancestry and contemporary experience are therefore not opposed. They coexist within objects that are resolutely present: tactile, physical and spatial. The exhibition asks what material can retain when words are insufficient, and how contemporary art can make memory tangible without turning it into illustration.

In this sense, both artists treat matter as more than medium. It becomes witness, archive and presence — a place where identity, spirituality, resilience and cultural continuity can remain in motion.

Exhibition Details

Dates: 5 September – 11 October 2026
Location: OOA Gallery, Sitges (near Barcelona), Spain
Artists: Alex Rocca & Médéric Turay
Inquiries: Prices & availability on request