Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa: De espiral en espiral

Performance at the Museu de Arte Contemporânea / CCB, Lisbon

September 20 – September 20, 2025

View of the exhibition room Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa. Light Spectra, at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía. May, 2025. Installation view: Place of Comfort, 2016-2020. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Latin American and Caribbean Fund and Fund for the Twenty-First Century, 2023. Photographic archive of the Reina Sofía Museum.

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As part of Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa’s solo exhibition at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (May 28-October 20, 2025), the artist will present a new performance that continues his exploration of symbolism, memory, and cultural narrative.

De espiral en espiral is a performance that intertwines European colonial history with the intimate memories of Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa’s family lineage, through a revisitation of the production and uses of playing cards ‘naipes’. The playing card monopoly became one of the main sources of revenue for the Spanish Monarchy, with its manufacturing tightly controlled by the Crown, which sought to eradicate forgery and its use in gambling. In the hands of the women in Ramírez-Figueroa’s family, however, the cards became something else: a tool for divinatory reading and a means of economic survival.

This intimate dimension transforms the symbolic weight of the cards as colonial artifacts into alternative uses and forms of knowledge, summoning a history that is both collective and deeply personal. In his practice, Ramírez-Figueroa dismantles hierarchies between official history and oral traditions, revealing the folds where the political and the affective converge.

Based on this symbolic system, the artist creates an original costume that functions simultaneously as an sculptural object and a performative element. Each garment is composed of various cards, meticulously hand-embroidered by Guatemalan weavers, establishing a direct connection with the artist’s heritage and indigenous artisanal knowledge.

The weavers are:

Elvira López

Noemi Acajabón Colón

Ani Garcia Moran

Fantina de León

Mishell Nuñez Salvador

Lorena Samayoa

Katherine Nuñez Salvador

Ana Llamas

Lucrecia Salvador

Andrea Branher

Daniela López

Andrea Branher

Katherine Zepeda

Sarah Chicohay

Eufemia Gónzales

More information about the exhibition and the artist

De espiral en espiral, 2025

A performance by Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa, on the occasion of his exhibition Light Spectra at the Museo Reina Sofía

Organized by: MNCARS and the TBA21 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary Foundation

Produced by: TBA21 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary Foundation and BoCA - Biennial of Contemporary Arts, with the support of Galerie Nordenhake Berlin/Stockholm/Mexico City, Mendes Wood DM São Paulo/Brussels/Paris/New York, Proyectos Ultravioleta Guatemala City, and Sies + Höke Düsseldorf.

LOCATION

MAC/CCB – Museum of Contemporary Art and Architecture Centre

Centro Cultural de Belém

Praça do Império, 1449-003

Lisbon, Portugal

DATE

September 20, 2025

ABOUT THE ARTIST

The work of Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa (b. 1978, Guatemala City) fuses sculptural installation, video and performance to open a reflection on his own biography and on his country's turbulent history, marked by different forms of violence and armed conflict. Ramírez-Figueroa's practice draws from Latin American political activism and experimental theatre, calling into question established and entrenched narratives that have emerged on specific episodes in the recent past. Through the physicality of bodies and staged environments that envisage fantasy and reality, the artist revisits his own traumas and those of a country shaped by colonial extractivism, civil war and the social imbalance of the Indigenous population.

He lives and works in Guatemala City. His work has been exhibited at museums and art centres around the world, for instance the Museo de Arte Moderno de Bogotá – MAMBO, Bogotá (2023), The Power Plant, Toronto (2020), New Museum, New York (2018), CAPC musée d'art contemporain de Bordeaux (2017), the KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2016), Tate Modern, London (2015) and Castello di Rivoli, Turin (2013), among others.