Mujeres que cargan animales: Gema Polanco
Overview
Mujeres que cargan animales, Gema Polanco

By David Morán

 

The earth trembles, the ground splits open and a jumble of rocks and rubble seems intent on devouring everything. The forests and fields burn as far as the eye can see. Rivers burst their banks and the sea erodes the shores, sweeping away everything in its path, until it piles it all up into a mass of shapeless debris in the arid centre of the peninsulas. It is a world transformed into permanent devastation as a result of human action. 

“When the moon is at its highest and brightest, we climb up the cleft to where the flowers grow, pick them so that there is plenty of red, and let the water flow from the spring to that spot”
Doris Lessing
 
The earth trembles, the ground splits open and a jumble of rocks and rubble seems intent on devouring everything. The forests and fields burn as far as the eye can see. Rivers burst their banks and the sea erodes the shores, sweeping away everything in its path, until it piles it all up into a mass of shapeless debris in the arid centre of the peninsulas. It is a world transformed into permanent devastation as a result of human action. And yet, amidst the chaos, a space of possibility emerges. When everything is ablaze, it is common to see women carrying animals, children and the elderly; protecting their homes, saving crops and creating neighbourhood rescue networks in which no lives are more important than others, understanding that all depend on the same fabric of relationships.
 
It was upon seeing these women on the news during a summer marked by disaster that Mujeres que cargan animales (Women that carry animals), Gema Polanco’s (Valencia, 1992) first solo exhibition at ADN Galeria, began to take shape in the artist’s imagination. Comprising recent works that engage in dialogue with earlier pieces—which are fundamental to her career—the exhibition offers a concise introduction to her practice, showcases her most recent concerns and hints at the conceptual horizons towards which her work is heading. Although it is not formulated as an explicit political programme, Gema Polanco’s work stands in opposition to discourses that glorify the use of force and disparage communal forms of support and care. In this context, the act of protecting and sustaining emerges as a form of resistance against such discourses: it champions vulnerability not as weakness, but as a strength capable of creating spaces of resistance.
 
But the exhibition is not limited to representing this gesture. It also questions the imperative that demands certain bodies sustain, repair and protect what others abandon. What changes when care—long relegated to the private sphere by certain productivist logics—is recognition as a public condition for collective survival?
 
In La grieta (The cleft), an unconventional fable about the dawn of the human species, Doris Lessing imagines an early community of women whose apparent self-sufficiency is disrupted by the arrival of men. In the novel, rather than presenting a fixed opposition between the feminine and the masculine, Lessing explores a fictional account of origins from which to consider how risk, dependence and the responsibility of care are distributed; in other words, matters that should concern us all. As the story unfolds, the British author has the women voice their astonishment at the indifference shown by some men towards them and towards the girls and boys who are being born and populating the world. “Don’t you care about us? Don’t we matter to you?” is the refrain that runs through the novel.
 
And it is precisely on this divide that the artist bases an exhibition concept centred on three large-format watercolours depicting women protecting animals. These engage in a dialogue with a series of drawings centred on the recurring motif of the tear and with one of the artist’s signature flag works, which brings the exhibition to a close. Taken together, these works unfold the emotional arc of the exhibition: from care to mourning, from pain to a persistence not without conflict.
 
In the large-format watercolours, brought together under the title Mujeres que cargan animales cuando todo arde (Women that carry animals when everything burns), the figures function not only as symbols of care, but as subjects with agency, capable of confronting the logics of domination and control that surround them. Their care is not uncritical: their gestures take a stand against what they witness.
 
One of them walks past us with indifference and disdain whilst rescuing a dog and a deer. Another turns her back on us, as if wishing to shift the responsibility for our actions back onto us. A third stands tall before us, defiant, holding a young animal—we cannot tell whether it is sleeping, waiting to be fed, or has just died.
 
In all three figures, one senses anger at the destruction and a radical opposition to the indiscriminate exploitation of the environment. All remain standing or move forward with dignity; none accepts the order of a society that “does not take care”.
 
The power with which they challenge us —their call to re-examine the ways in which we organise affection, work and dependence —radiates throughout the gallery via an installation in which the watercolours spill beyond the boundaries of the paper and the frame. As they spread across the painted walls of the room, the images take over the exhibition space.
 
Alongside these figures, the drawings centred on the motif of the tear engage in a dialogue with the flag that brings the exhibition to a close, bearing the slogan No sentir nada / Y sentirlo todo (To feel nothing / And to feel everything). These works highlight the paralysis and grief caused by the sheer scale of the disaster. The women carrying animals are not, therefore, left on the sidelines of this mourning. Sustaining life comes at a price: an exhaustion that overwhelms and causes anguish.
 
Nevertheless, tears—which serve as an image of a piercing, real pain in the face of the world’s destruction and calamity—can become flames, or wings, as is the case in several of the drawings shown here. Stigmata and wounds can serve to awaken our conscience or ignite our sense of rebellion.
 
Algo me pincha (Something pricks me), the artist tells us. There is pain in these pieces, but the pain does not turn into passivity: it can trigger the decision to withdraw affection from those who do not know how to cherish it. That withdrawal is encapsulated in the phrase: Si me tratan de atrapar, me voy sin mirar atrás (If they try to trap me, I’ll leave without looking back). It is not an escape, but a delicate and relentless form of setting boundaries. Does human life not, after all, depend on networks of mutual dependence?
 
These women who carry animals, these furious presences that denounce the lack of care, will continue to generate life and meaning upon the ruins of those institutions incapable of sustaining the conditions necessary for their own survival. For is not a mere crack in the rubble enough for a delicate blade of grass to once again herald the rebirth of a new world?
 
David Morán Álvarez, September 2026
Works
Back to exhibitions