Cantero’s work is set on ground ravaged by flooding, turning devastation into the starting point for a profound ritual of repair. The artist’s central action is the manual and patient creation of 230 spheres of earth. This slow, almost ritualistic process is not merely productive, but a healing practice that seeks to re-establish an essential link with matter and time.

In this context, the body regains its fundamental role as a mediator between loss and repair. The slowness of the gesture contrasts with the trauma of the flood, inscribing a new rhythm of persistence and resistance in the wounded landscape.

The work proposes a reading of the landscape that goes beyond the merely natural. The landscape is conceptualised as a territory in permanent negotiation, a web of memories, wounds and political and ecological developments. Faced with this reality, the creation of the spheres constitutes an action of active restitution, a poetic attempt to restore order and form to the scattered matter.

The work rehearses a choreography of care that is performed in the friction between the earth and the river, between the trace of damage and the shadow of possibility. Each of the 230 spheres, despite being destined to inevitably dissolve upon contact with water or the elements, carries a powerful symbolic charge. Their temporary fragility insists on the persistence of life and the ethical possibility of recomposing the world.

The act of creating these spheres by hand and on an intimate scale questions the logic of monumentality and the scale of catastrophe. Rodríguez demonstrates that resistance is found in the small, in the care taken in the gesture, where artistic action becomes an ecological imperative and a way of affirming life and memory in the face of indifference or violence in the environment. The work is, in essence, a map of material and bodily resilience.

Victor Lopez Zumelzu