Local.ext
Local.ext (Madrid)
Local.ext was created to promote visual artists and contemporary photographers from its local context by expanding their visibility within the international art market through participation in art fairs abroad.
In response to the underrepresentation of these artists within existing market structures, as well as the significant barriers to accessing them, Local.ext operates as a swarm: a flexible, project-based network that assembles around specific objectives, mobilizes the people and resources required to achieve them, and dissolves once the operation is complete. Each intrusion constitutes a temporary formation that brings together artists, curators, collectors, and collaborators to activate new channels of circulation, visibility, and exchange beyond the limits of the local scene.
Local.ext’s model is decentralized, adaptive, and project-driven. Rather than relying on a permanent hierarchy, it connects distinct agents for specific operations in a horizontal way, functioning much like a peer-to-peer network. It operates less like a conventional gallery and more like a responsive collective infrastructure: assembling through temporary constellations, acting strategically, and dissolving once its objective has been reached.
Through this approach, Local.ext develops a distributed mode of cultural action that is collaborative, tactical, and responsive to specific contexts. Its aim is to strengthen the international projection of local artistic practices while fostering professional exchange and creating conditions for the long-term circulation, visibility, and impact of contemporary art.
Proposal
“Local.ext” is a project that emerged from the independent space El Local. It operates as a separate extension of the association, enabling it to participate in art fairs and promote artists from the scene surrounding the Madrid-based space. At SWAB Barcelona, Local.ext presents projects by two different visual artists: Lara Uro and Ignacio Navas.
Lara Uro’s presentation consists of a series of drawings and object-sculptures that emerge from a formal investigation into the design of antidepressant and anti-anxiety medications, focusing on colour, scale, and dimensions.
Ignacio Navas, meanwhile, presents several works from his project 28045, a visual investigation into the signs of identity that disappear from neighbourhoods and cities during processes of transformation.
Lara Uro (Madrid, Spain) is a visual artist whose practice examines, through the interplay of form and matter, the emergence of new representational frameworks for notions such as disorder, functionality, structure, and space. Employing sculpture, image-making, drawing, and installation, her work reconfigures the elemental components of the systems that underpin our understanding of reality and its modes of organization. Through a meticulous and deliberate process of deconstructing geometric figures, regulated experiences, and volumetric boundaries, she introduces variables that unsettle normative symbols and ideals, thereby enabling imaginaries that operate beyond ostensibly naturalized systemic logics. Each work constitutes a perceptual experiment in which materials articulate unexpected behaviors and configurations, generating situations in which tension, weight, resistance, and utility diverge from their conventional conditions.
Ignacio Navas (b. 1989 Tudela, lives and works in Madrid) creates computational, generative and interactive projects based on photographic image to research how dominant structures—political, economic, or social—are made present and shape our everyday affairs. With this approach, Ignacio explores the possibilities that emerging technologies, computing, and new media offer to the photographic medium.
His recent work has received support from several grants and institutions, including the Visual Arts Creation Fellowship (Community of Madrid, 2024) and the Plastic and Visual Arts Fellowship (Government of Navarra, 2024). His images and interactive installations have also been part of initiatives such as Plat(t)form at Fotomuseum Winterthur (Switzerland, 2024), the Photoworks Digital Programme (UK, 2023), the Return2Ithaca Residency (Greece, 2023), and the FUTURES European Photography Platform (Netherlands, 2022).
Ignacio believes that contemporary creation cannot be understood without actively engaging in its own management. This conviction drives him to lead collective initiatives such as La Embajada (2024–), a platform to showcase projects created within the Spanish territorial context in the unofficial circuit of the Rencontres d’Arles festival, or El Local (2023–), an independent space for contemporary photography in Madrid.
