Space and place are basic components of the lived world; we take them for granted. But when we stop to think about them, they can take on unexpected meanings and raise questions we had never asked ourselves before.

— Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place (1977, p. 3)

When you travel through the territory of Ersília, you encounter the ruins of abandoned cities: there are no walls left, no bones of the dead that the wind has carried away, only intricate webs of relationships seeking form.

— Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities (1972, p. 76)

These two visions offer us contrasting ways of looking. Tuan opens up a space for inquiry; Calvino proposes a dreamlike archaeology of meaning. In this exhibition, Martí Ripoll and Jo Milne create worlds of visible and invisible territories.

In its simplest definition, a territory is a specific area—of land, sea, or air—under control or jurisdiction. But the term can also evoke less tangible domains: knowledge, memory, perception. The works in this exhibition move fluidly between these registers.

Martí Ripoll's territory may resemble the landscape of Lleida, but his paintings are not simple representations. They reimagine and remember—fictions constructed from observation, configured as if the landscape itself could finally take on the forms he proposes.

Jo Milne's territories also start from observation, but they point inward. Their structures, like networks or filaments, evoke cellular cytoskeletons: underlying forms that we do not see, but which shape us. The threads she collects from the fields of La Segarra—remnants of those used to tie straw bales—become analogies for these cellular forms that she studied with scientists from the Department of Medicine and Life Sciences at Pompeu Fabra University (MELIS/UPF).

Despite their differences, Ripoll and Milne establish a dialogue with the landscapes they share. Their works open windows for us to ask ourselves: what territories do we really inhabit? And how could we look at them differently?

More information about the exhibition “Territoris In-Visibles” at our Instagram @galeriaespaicavallers