A vademecum book and 100,000 bamboo sticks at the back of the installation. The latest exhibition by artist Romina Rivero will close in two days, on February 7, 2026, at the Artizar Gallery in Tenerife. Far from seeking to provoke visitors, 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 physician Romina Rivero (Santa Cruz de Tenerife, 1982) questions modern medicine as a politically sanctioned instrument for indiscriminately operating on bodies. It examines bodies and societies accustomed to accepting the use of drugs as the sole mechanism for healing; feminized bodies with a history of colonialism and repression stretching from our ancestors to the present day.
In the exhibition, Rivero raises various questions surrounding legacies and their respective impacts. At the far end of the exhibition, the room materializes into an installation where red reigns supreme, driven by its instinct for conflict.
The installation Mujo, of impermanence , puts a vademecum book in confrontation with the strength of natural fibers, flowers and fragrances emitted by more than 100,000 incense sticks tied in small flower-shaped bunches, 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 transmission and memory. The use of red here takes on a particular dimension: an aesthetically Asian heritage refers to life, protection, and vital energy, establishing a symbolic bridge between Eastern traditions, ritual practices, and contemporary political discourses. 
The colonized territories, such as the Canary Islands, says the author Françoise Vergès, which form the most fruitful experimental laboratories for exploitation and control trials. The installation, from a sensory and exploratory perspective, seeks to propose a critical reading of modern medicine and its break with popular medicinal wisdom and botany.
Romina Rivero. Exhibition Decolonizing the Skin (2025-2026). Courtesy of Artizar Gallery
Decolonizing the Skin , open to the public 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 for revaluing history. A body traversed by ancient knowledge and contemporary technologies, where healing is not a procedure, but a situated, slow, and profoundly human practice.
