Cibirán is thrilled to present Calima Express, a solo exhibition by Juf, a duo formed by Leto Ybarra and Bea Ortega Botas. Juf (Madrid / New York) is a collaborative research practice operating at the intersection of contemporary art, poetry, and theatre.
For Calima Express, their first solo exhibition, the duo began their investigation with the calima that took Madrid by surprise on March 14, 2022. The city woke beneath an orange sky saturated with fine particles of Saharan dust carried by southerly winds. This meteorological phenomenon, known as calima, dramatically reduced visibility, and the dust settled on every surface for days. The particles carried by the 2022 episode were reported to contain traces of radioactive residues associated with the nuclear tests conducted by France in the Algerian Sahara between 1960 and 1966. Their presence reveals how deeply our landscapes remain entangled with histories of coercion, and how the material consequences of these histories resist physical and political containment. They travel with the winds, settling indiscriminately and disregarding geopolitical boundaries.
The exhibition examines two intertwined mechanisms of influence, deterrence and seduction, and how they operate across both geopolitical and aesthetic contexts.
By encapsulating reproductions of Clyfford Still's paintings within marble, Juf reconfigures the conditions under which his work is encountered. Working on a monumental scale, Still applied thick passages of paint with a palette knife. Torn, jagged forms inhabit his canvases, their irregular edges emerging from expansive fields of color. These fissure-like contours, recalling geological fractures, constitute what the artist called "lifelines." They might be read as references to the rocky and mining landscapes Still came across as a child, mineral veins that had to be followed in order to orient oneself. Only the lifelines remain distinctly visible, when transferred into the marbles, as if highlighting the idea of finding a way out, of coming out alive.
Calima Express, a train of decanters filled with calima dust, seems to move through the exhibition with no fixed destination. It carries traces of memory, mourning, and destruction. In contrast, the color of the dust is striking, almost joyful. Its earthy yellow seems lifted directly from one of Still's paintings. The same tension operates in P and P, a work composed of two playing mats. One is a familiar object that has accumulated traces of repeated use; the other is a found object. The two are joined by a frame that distills the dominant colors of the mats, one orange and one green, yet the histories embedded in the objects resist such abstraction.
Other works on display echo the moments when deterrence and seduction overlap. Inside a wooden box lined with mirrors, an enlarged pea revisits The Princess and the Pea. The work considers how the amplification of certain sensations operates in contemporary politics. For its part, Golden Eggs contains dummy eggs for hens, used in nest boxes to indicate the ideal place to establish a nest and to stimulate egg-laying. These eggs function as a strategy of seduction as well as deterrence: they attract the hen toward a specific place, making it appear safe and desirable; at the same time, because they are made of solid wood and are unbreakable, they frustrate the impulse to peck at them and deactivate that habit. Golden Eggs is a nod to artist Remo Bianco’s boxes containing objects covered in snow: building on Remo’s considerations on how everyday materials can speak to geopolitical situations and imposed collective psychological states of forgiveness and joy.
Calima Express ultimately suggests that once strategies exceed the intentions that produced them, they generate new and unpredictable forms of relation. Through different gestures, the duo traces these unstable movements, revealing how histories and violent policies continue to circulate long after their apparent conclusion.