Jardín de las mixturas (The Garden of Mixtures) puts forward a presentation of the work of Alejandra Riera — “a series of attempts”, as she prefers to call it — across more than two decades. How can the poetic modes practiced in these attempts specifically unfold? How can they linger over long periods of time and address the density of their fabric? How can it be done by creating places that make room for the transit of anyone who approaches?

The Jardín de las mixturas is not conceived as closed space and time (the exhibition room and its programmed temporality), but rather as an ensemble of unique places linked by an open narrative frame and a certain freedom of circulation.

Therefore, the corridor and vaults of the basement pick up on that which was carried out in 2013 in the project Poetic(s) of Incompleteness. Along with the attempts presented on that occasion, the gap in one of its walls has since allowed air and light to pass from the outside to the subsoil of the building.

The garden passage, on the ground floor, extends this gesture over into the courtyard of the old hospital. Since 2017, on open collective of workers from the Museo and people from other places have been testing out, in two parterres in the Sabatini Building Garden, forms of tending to the co-existence of human and non-human presence that exists there: How do they relate? How can a place be made for ensembles that dismantle the imaginary of separation convened between the so-called “human” and the so-called “non-human”, between that which has the right to the word and that considered voiceless? How do they speak and support one another? What do we learn from the attention towards the place in which we find ourselves? How do we and the place transform?

Places of trial, on the third floor, are arranged into four spaces which are also entries to Riera’s investigations with others since the mid-1990s, and articulated around films-documents, organic writing and image-text. Such entries (Poetic(s) of Incompleteness; observations of colours: a place of questioning and doubt; A collective picture: useful and the poetry of the ensemble; vegetation: presence and moving thoughts) outline common questions with their own vocabulary, placing the stress on the specific sensibilities and forms of making with them. If we view our work as different forms of love, in which each of us attempts to fill our time and energy with other beings and things, then in the fabric of such work there is always the possibility of feeling the power of an artisan act.