Image: Es Baluard
Es Baluard Museu d’Art Contemporani de Palma will open ‘A media lumbre’ on 23 July 2026, presenting an exhibition that places vernacular knowledge, oral tradition and materially grounded contemporary art at its center. Running in Palma through 18 October 2026, the project is one part of a larger itinerary that spans several venues in Spain and links museum programming to wider debates around sustainability, heritage and the status of so-called “minor arts.”
At Es Baluard, the exhibition is shown in Exhibition Hall B and is curated by Blanca de la Torre. The museum’s listing gives the Palma dates as 24 July to 18 October 2026, with the opening scheduled for 23 July at 19:30. The project is also presented as a free-standing exhibition within a larger framework that began earlier in the year at the IVAM in Valencia and will continue later at the CDAN in Huesca and Museu Terra in L’Espluga de Francolí, Tarragona.
The exhibition brings together works by an extensive group of artists including Julie C. Fortier, Ricardo Calero, Andrea Canepa, Tonina Crespí, Teresa Lanceta, Lucía Loren, Teresa Matas, Lara Ordóñez, Nuria Riaza, Belén Rodríguez, Cecilia Vicuña and Sarah Viguer Cebriá. Es Baluard’s project page also names many additional participating artists, indicating a large collaborative structure rather than a compact single-artist show. The curatorial framework is consistent across the venues, while each site activates the project from its own context.
According to the museum, ‘A media lumbre’ — translated on the site as “Gently Under the Flame” — gathers works that engage materials and forms of vernacular knowledge traditionally devalued as “minor arts,” including ceramics, clay, wool, textiles, embroidery and natural fibres. The exhibition text also stresses the role of voice, sound and silence, and describes oral transmission as a vehicle for memory, evoking filandones, the night-time gatherings around the hearth in which stories were told while people worked manually.
The project is framed as an argument for preserving ancestral know-how and for recovering overlooked narratives through contemporary art. Es Baluard presents matter as “a living archive,” and links material practice to memory, landscape and community. Wool is associated with transhumance and care; plant fibres with fragile ecosystems and sustainability strategies; ceramics with the utilitarian forms of containing and preserving everyday life. In this context, materials are not treated simply as media, but as carriers of social and territorial knowledge.
The exhibition’s multi-site structure is significant in itself. Es Baluard describes the itinerary as a “sensitive cartography” that moves between urban and rural contexts and between tradition and experimentation. Its production follows sustainability principles that prioritize natural, non-polluting materials, the reuse of elements and the elimination of international transport. That approach gives the project added relevance at a moment when museums and curators are increasingly weighing environmental responsibility alongside exhibition making.
For Es Baluard, the project also underscores the museum’s role in staging conversations about decentralising knowledge and territory. By linking contemporary artistic practice with crafts, farming labour, indigenous practices and ways of life connected to land and water, ‘A media lumbre’ asks what kinds of knowledge museums value, and how exhibitions can help keep those forms alive.
