Invisibles

In the British television series The Invisible Man (1958), Peter Brady, a physicist working in a government laboratory during the Cold War, becomes accidentally invisible after an experiment strips him of all physical appearance. To survive, he must now wrap himself in bandages and wear dark glasses to give shape to an existence that has become elusive.

It is precisely within this state of disappearance that Brady discovers a new form of action. Far from retreating into himself, he decides to use his invisibility to do good. This new body allows him to intervene differently—more discreetly, less spectacularly, yet no less effectively. This ability to exist on the margins of society, to escape the gaze, resonates with another key notion in this exhibition: fugitivity.

For African American poet and theorist Fred Moten, fugitivity is not merely an escape, but a radical form of underground presence. It is the refusal to be captured by normative systems—of race, gender, class, or ability. The fugitive acts without submitting, resists without revealing, and in that very invisibility, invents collective, improvised, and unruly forms of life. For Moten, to be invisible is sometimes to survive otherwise, to create from the margins, to heal from the shadows.

Feminist struggles have also long questioned what is visible and what is not. Who speaks? Who is seen? Who remains in the shadows? Women—and especially racialized women—have historically been erased from narratives, knowledge, and representation. Invisibility is not neutral: it is constructed and imposed. Yet from that absence, resistance also emerges, solidarities are formed, aesthetics are invented.

This exhibition takes place in that shifting space where erasure and power, silence and intervention, survival and domination intersect. It explores contemporary forms of invisibilization—social, political, ecological—while also focusing on sick bodies, among others those affected by AIDS. For decades, these bodies were rendered invisible through stigma, institutional silence, and symbolic violence.

To these bodies are added those of wounded territories, polluted landscapes that, under an intact appearance, conceal deep violences. These are ecological—such as contaminated soils where life is poisoned over time—and colonial, in natural spaces reshaped to displace native populations.

This exhibition does not aim to show everything, but it claims to be engaged and conscious. There are voices without faces, discreet gestures, blurred silhouettes, incomplete archives. The goal is not to reveal, but to learn to see differently, to listen to what escapes us, to consider the shadow as a space of invention. In the invisible, there is care for the other, resistance, memory, and possibly, another way of inhabiting the world.