The Joan Miro Foundation is opening the season of exhibitions in its experimental space Espai 13 with Invisible Circles, a cycle selected by Ferran Barenblit, whose central theme will be the physical and social environment in which we spend our daily lives.

Leopoldo Ferran and Agustina Otero, a pair of artists who have been working together since 1994, will open the cycle on 6th November with The Liquid Trench, an installation that questions the validity of representation. The debate has been going on for many years. In a world dominated by images, it is the representation of reality that seems to count more than reality itself.

In The Liquid Trench, Leopoldo Ferran and Agustina Otero propose an imaginary landscape, an unreal topography of translucent material that is separated from the viewer by grilles, forming a kind of illusory frontier that in no way prevents this invented reality from invading the viewer's space. On the other side of the room, the aluminium cones appear as a hostile element. The counterpoint of this installation are the goldfish bowls hanging from the ceiling, which contain small representations of landscapes submerged in the water. The metaphor denotes a society that lives in the reflection of things, in the representation of reality. The curved glass of the goldfish bowls separates two worlds, one real and the other fictitious. Like the frame of a painting, the bowl encloses its own simulacrum.

Invisible Circles is an attempt to study the landscapes - both physical and social - in which we live. It therefore seems natural to start with an installation on the way of seeing and understanding our surroundings. This proposal by Ferran and Otero reminds us that reality is a difficult concept to capture and that, however hard we try to shelter from it, we can never build a real refuge. The trench in a hostile environment is "liquid" and intangible.

Leopoldo Ferran (Irun, Guipu'zcoa, 1963) and Agustina Otero (Leon, 1960) have recently presented Cartography for the corridor of a sealess delta at the Gustavo de Maeztu museum in Estella (Navarra), Tutto sono isole at the Deposito de Aguas in Vitoria and In the garden of the stranded perfume at the Fabrika, Spazio d'Arte Temporaneo in Rovereto, Italy.