Julia Llerena

Based on the unfinished personal tome Amanecer (Daybreak), written by the artist’s mother, this project addresses the conflict between motherhood and creation from an intimate and structural perspective.

The text comes to a halt at page 180, due to the author’s illness, and this interruption becomes a central element in the artist’s research, rendering the physical dimension of the act of writing perfectly tangible - in line with Marguerite Duras’s idea that one cannot write without bodily strength.

The project is formalised as a pictorial and sculptural topology of conflict, in which absence is transformed into structure through the material transposition of two archives: one intimate, the other referential.

The latter archive is based on Moyra Davey’s Mother Reader: Essential Writings on Motherhood, a compilation of texts on the creative experience. Through processes of structural sonification, the frequency of the words is converted into form, symbolically restoring the interrupted text and endowing it with a collective dimension.

Biography

In her practice, situated between the archive and archaeology, Julia Llerena (Seville, 1985) employs material exploration and found objects to construct new narratives and reorder time. She has exhibited in spaces such as the Sabrina Amrani Gallery, the Cibrián Gallery (San Sebastian), Fresh Window (New York), the Spanish Embassy in Tokyo, DA2 (Salamanca), CAAC (Seville), the Condeduque Centre for Contemporary Culture, the Carl-Herning Pedersen & Alfelts Museum (Denmark), and the Rodriguez Foundation, among others. She has also participated in creative residencies at Brecha (La Paz, Mexico), La Moissie (France), and La Maison N’Zima (Ivory Coast).

Julia Llerena is a recipient of the 2026 Six-month residencies for visual artists.