Exhibition Title: “Weaving Black Nests Under The Skin”
Venue: Urban Nation Gallery
Bulowstrasse 97, Berlin, Germany
Dates: 06/11/2025 - 29/03/2026
Weaving black nests under the skin is a philosophical exploration of inter-beings, arthropod-like organisms, and their embryonic fluctuations. Blending scientific inquiry and hybridisation, Becerra’s research investigates intermediate states of existence: between gestation and decay.
Developed during her residency at Fresh A.I.R., Weaving black nests under the skin questions the illusion of separateness, embracing cyclicality as a fundamental condition of life. Within nature, this conceptual coordinate exists both in the gestational form of organisms and, on the other end of the spectrum, in the rotting stages of biological matter.
The installation unfolds as a suspended network of prosthetic beings composed of blown glass, steel, organic debris, silicone membranes, motors, threads, resin, and pigmented fluids. Arthropoidal and vessel-like morphologies emerge from these organic architectures: skeletal extensions intertwined with soft membranes and threadlike circuits carrying fluid through translucent bodies.
Encapsulated fragments of matter -trapped within resin or suspended in liquid- echo the notion of life within life, where remnants of existence persist and regenerate through new material configurations. These hybrid entities pulsate and circulate matter, embodying both decay and renewal. Their porous anatomies evoke a choreography of transformation, where the boundaries between organism and machine, matter and memory, begin to dissolve.
Through this project, Becerra reflects on the cyclical conditions of existence, proposing that gestation and decomposition are not antagonistic opposites but complementary forces within the same continuum. Emerging from these reflections, suspended prosthetic beings blur the borders between biological inevitability and speculative potential. By imagining new kin makings with the oddkin, Becerra seeks to inspire, at least for a while, alternative worldviews in which linear narratives of life, progress, and death yield to hybrid, cyclical forms of existence.
Weaving black nests under the skin invites viewers to consider life as a process of perpetual co-participation, where matter endlessly weaves itself into new forms of being.
Text: Lena Becerra
SomoS Gallery - Berlin, Germany - 2025
XX: Collapsed Cartilage conjures a space of infestation and interspecies entanglement, where parasitic organisms pulse with movement, pumping and expelling dark fluids through metastasized arteries.
Rooted in xenofeminist thought, the installation embraces the glitch as an opening for new narratives—where infestation is not just disruption but a rewriting of networks, a challenge to fixed structures of knowledge.
This piece reimagines ecologies through a speculative lens, inviting viewers into an alternate kinship with parasitic forms, where organic matter, fluids, and technology merge beyond the human.
In a space where gravity still dictates, three containers breathe a dark liquid. It is neither water nor oil: it is memory flowing, tissue remembering. From the iron legs—rigid, industrial supports—prostheses emerge that do not seek to complete a body, but to strain it, to interrogate it. They cling to fragments of glass and organic matter as if trying to pin down the unstable, to hold what inevitably mutates.
The hoses, like tentacles or vessels, connect, drain, traverse. The liquid runs not only through the aquariums but also through frames suspended from the ceiling, where the silicone within throbs like skin in waiting, like a membrane that once covered something that no longer exists.
Banksia follicles embed themselves as remnants of an alternate ecosystem, fossil capsules still in dialogue with the soft, the mechanical, the post-organic.
Solo show by Lena Becerra at HAIR ARI
514 Elizabeth Street, Melbourne, Australia.
Follicle refers to both the ovarian secretory gland—a cavity or sac—and a dry fruit derived from a single carpel, which opens on one side only to release its seeds.
Mouth like follicles withhold or carry an unnervingly relatable nature, introducing a visceral, synesthetic mirroring experience. Here, we reflect on other organic entities as they reflect on us -creating a continuous loop of unsettling kinship.
At the centre of this installation, a tension emerges between hard, cold steel cartilage and fluid, pulsating motion. Peristaltic pumps, mimicking the process of peristalsis—used in biological systems such as the gastrointestinal tract—create an artificial lifelike rhythm. Stringed tubing metastasizes like arteries across the exhibition space, a hybrid circulatory system carrying both physical and metaphorical nutrients.
Challenging traditional research methods that brutally dissect and structurally archive matter to align with dominant Eurocentric colonial knowledge structures, this work offers an alternative perspective, reframing dismemberment as both generative and gestational.
Here, as the body appears dismembered rather than dissected, each fragment is held by peripheral devices as though they continue their life cycle in isolation. This fragmentation resonates as a fractal experience of being, where each part recapitulates the whole, mirroring the infinite branching structures of existence. The concept of fractal capillarity extends this idea, suggesting a networked fluidity that transcends individual boundaries, linking disparate elements in an intricate and recursive flow.
Unfolding like a chart, unconscious associations draw information from the unknown, evoking a collective unconscious that plays with uncanny kinships. These connections blur the lines between organism and mechanism, life and death, known and ethereal.
Prosthetic surfaces penetrate soft organic and synthetic flesh, creating a hybrid, living membrane.
Soft and hard, fictional and speculative, the morphologies used in this installation carry information which is ancestral and migratory. Here, the artist explores from her own latin diaspora perspective relationships and connections of inherited source tracing symbiotic patterns and textures across the global south.
In this feral and speculative exploration of non-human entities, hybrid ecosystems gestate otherworldly phenomena. The installation invites us to envision a more fluid, circular and relational existence—where human and non-human forms coalesce, creating spaces for kinships yet to be imagined.
17 January - 9 February 2025
October 2024 in Barcelona, Spain
In Ex0phycology, hybrid creatures explore the breeding morphologies of the gestational processes of worlds and -beyond human- relationships that operate directly on the dermis of the social fabric and, therefore, in the building of a web of collective memory.
