Amidst the bustle of JUSTMAD 2025 – under the curatorship of Óscar García García – Canary Islands artist Romina Rivero presents her performance Continuous Suture. In it, the artist repairs the Spanish flag, stitch by stitch — a gesture at once fragile and forceful, evoking the need to tend to wounds both personal and collective.

 

Defending 50 years of freedom and democracy. With quiet determination and a powerful symbolic charge, Rivero performs the live act of suturing the Spanish flag, conjuring the need to heal, mend, and reframe the fragments that shape our collective identity.

 

The piece, inspired by the surgical technique of the same name, draws from the artist’s own reflective delicacy, her questioning of social structures, and her focus on reclaiming bodies and communities. This act of “healing” through a surgical intervention underscores how, all too often, the true social fabric must be restored with care and empathy. In this way, Rivero proposes — through a medical gesture — an act of clarity, resistance and transmutation; for in this case, the purpose of opening the wound is to let it breathe. To transform pain into dignity, she suggests.

 

Rivero’s proposal steers away from provocation; her performance offers a space for reflection and hope, revealing a profound respect for the complexity of the symbol she chooses to repair.

 

This work confirms the strength and openness of her artistic language, consistently aimed at unveiling social wounds in order to propose gestures of reconciliation.

 

Continuous Suture manages to move a diverse and heterogeneous audience. With each approximation of the wound’s edges, it initiates a dialogue on the fragility and courage involved in piecing back together what defines us. In a context where art is lived with particular intensity, Romina’s proposal — supported by the curatorial vision of Óscar García García — invites us to imagine futures in which the scar, far from being a taboo, becomes the living testimony of our capacity to regenerate.

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