Open studio
Performance
2025, March 22
Land, in front of the Faculty of Fine Arts, Polytechnic University of Valencia – UPV, Valencia, Spain
Material: folding table, tablecloth, tableware.
Photos: Ana Veintimilla, Xus Francés, Lluis Salvador, Toni Calderón.
Having a studio is a declaration of ownership over space.
My studio has a sky-blue ceiling
and a floor of living earth.
When ideas leave my mouth,
a few drops of saliva fall to the ground and,
over time,
they sprout into fragrant actions,
perfumed by the manure used as fertilizer.
At the invitation of curator and artist Xus Francés,
who wished to visit my studio,
I decided to create the performative action: Open studio.
A fleeting moment
to be shared in a real space,
without walls and with a sky-blue ceiling.
***
Text written by Toni Calderón, art historian and critic:
The Gesture as Territory
Since the beginnings of conceptual art and performance, the notion of the studio as a closed space of production has been questioned.
NEA, an Italian artist based in Valencia, aligns herself with this line of thought through an intervention that destabilises the idea of the studio as a bounded enclosure, relocating it into the landscape—where the creative process blends with the very materiality of the surroundings.
In response to the initiative of Xus Francés, who organises studio visits with her students, NEA proposes a gesture of rupture: there is no studio to visit because the studio is not a predefined space, but rather a state—a permeable condition that expands and reconfigures according to its context.
The action takes place in the huerta, behind the Facultat de Belles Arts, where the artist lays out a black tablecloth and a few objects, offering only a symbolic reference to the idea of a studio.
However, this staging is not intended to imitate the traditional workshop, but to propose a critical reconsideration of its boundaries and conventions.
In A Thousand Plateaus, Gilles Deleuze asserts that “a territory is not a closed space, but a process of becoming.”
NEA’s proposal embodies this notion by dismantling the boundary between the realm of art and its exterior, dissolving the fixed structure of the studio in favour of an expanded territory—an environment in transformation where nature ceases to be a mere backdrop and becomes an active agent of creation.
Her intervention evokes practices such as Joseph Beuys’s social sculpture, in which art was conceived as a living process interconnected with its context, or Allan Kaprow’s Happenings, which dissolved conventional categories of artistic space to merge with everyday experience.
As in those proposals, art here is not contained in the object nor in representation, but in the action itself—in the shifting of meaning, in the activation of the place as an integral part of the process.
