Being Human Again, 32nd Bienal de Pontevedra

Group exhibitionPerformanceInstallationFoundationDrawingBiennale

Oct 8

View of the installation Saltimbanqui (Acrobat), 2025. All photos throughout: Bea Ciscar. Courtesy of Biennial Pontevedra

Bienal de Pontevedra + info

Bunga was part of the 32nd edition of the Bienal de Pontevedra (Pontevedra Biennial). This edition touches on themes such as spirituality, love, tolerance, truth and utopia, and focuses on analyzing “wars not only as military combats, but also as crises destroying the social, emotional and economic structure of societies. Inspired by thinkers like Rob Riemen and Susan Sontag, the exhibition suggests that, in order to overcome these conflicts, human beings must 'be human again', recovering their ability to be reflective and empathetic. Through art, spirituality and imagination, it seeks to give hope and to encourage collective reflection and healing.”

At Fundación Rosón Arte Contemporáneo, Bunga presented a series of installations, drawings and collages, that invite us to reflect on a new-found balance of societal life marked by precarious stability of both structures and communities that harbour brittle interconnections.

Pensar con las manos (Thinking with your hands, 2025) focuses its attention on the hands that create, that build, that think. Compared with the Western logic, which separates mind and body, the artist approaches a more incarnated vision of knowledge, in line with Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui’s ideas. The Aymara sociologist suggests a way of thinking that starts from the body and its bonds with the environment, from the entrails, where the visceral, the sensitive and the political are mixed. In these drawings, the hands execute, but they also feel, reflect and get involved. They are material witnesses of a practice where thought is rooted in the action and in the collectivity. Thus, the artist turns drawing into an act of resistance, in which knowledge is not imposed from above, but built from below, in community, with the body as territory and as a tool. Here, art is not separated from life; it becomes a vehicle for imagining other forms of existence that are fairer and more caring.

For his new work Todo principio como un sueño (It All Began as a Dream), he researched into the “Circo de los Muchachos”, a pioneering social space that was a decisive inspiration for the founding of Cirque du Soleil. This piece addresses a profound reflection on nomadic life, community, and the learning process in settings of resistance. Through a video, he captures the experience of the Benposta project, a self-managed circus-city that, during the Franco dictatorship, emerged in Galicia as a form of everyday dignity and resilience. Bunga spoke with a former director of the Circo de los Muchachos, Tomás Alfonso Martínez Sánchez, who is also the composer of the songs used on their tours around the world and who has provided a song for the biennial.

Far from bluntly idealizing the past, curator Agar Ledo explains, the audiovisual piece reconstructs fragments of history that are collective memory to make visible how, even in totalitarian situations, community-based practices emerge that promote collaboration, mutual support, and participatory education. With a lively and relatable montage, the video evokes the physical space of the circus and the city, and also "articulates a critique of hegemonic models to reclaim systems where children and young people make decisions and learn collectively. The utopian voices that accompany the piece are a reminder that emancipatory pedagogy is not a distant dream, but a concrete political possibility for greater social justice."