A vademecum book and 100,000 bamboo sticks at the back of the installation. Artist Romina Rivero's latest exhibition will close its doors in two days, on February 7, 2026, at the Artizar Gallery in Tenerife, and far from exclusively seeking to provoke attendees, the space has become a sensory, olfactory, and tactile journey. A call to the ancestral legacy of natural medicine.
Opened last December, the exhibition Decolonizing the Skin by visual artist and doctor Romina Rivero (Santa Cruz de Tenerife, 1982), questions modern medicine as an authorized political sentence to operate on bodies indiscriminately. Bodies and societies accustomed to accepting the use of drugs as the only healing mechanism; feminized bodies with a colonial history and repression from ancestors to our contemporary times.
In the exhibition, Rivero raises various questions about legacies and their respective impacts. At the end of the tour, the room materializes into an installation where red dominates with its instinct for conflict.
The installation Mujo, de la impermanencia, pits a vademecum book against the strength of natural fibers, flowers, and fragrances emitted by over 100,000 bamboo sticks tied in small flower-shaped bundles, creating a red mantle that seems to dance and cover the room with beauty and dynamism, while highlighting the power of nature as a legacy of succession and memory. The use of red takes on a particular dimension here: an aesthetically Asian heritage refers to life, protection, and vital energy, establishing a symbolic bridge between Eastern traditions, ritual practices, and contemporary political discourses.
Colonized territories, such as the Canary Islands, says author Françoise Vergès, form the most fruitful experimental laboratories for exploitation and control trials. The installation, from a sensory and exploratory perspective, seeks to offer a critical reading of modern medicine and its rupture with popular medicinal wisdom and botany.
Decolonizing the Skin, open for visits during the gallery's business hours, invites us to rethink the body not as a machine to be repaired, but as a sensitive and wise ecosystem, as well as colonial memory and the possibilities of reevaluating history. A body traversed by ancient knowledge and contemporary technologies, where healing is not a procedure, but a situated, slow, and deeply human practice.
Credits:
Romina Rivero (2025). Artizar Gallery, Tenerife
Photographs courtesy of Artizar Gallery, Madrid
