INTIMIDAD TRANSESCALAR
Madrid, 2026.
The Geominero Museum holds an archive of nonhuman times: minerals, rocks, and fossils that register processes of pressure, heat, and sedimentation. But these temporalities do not arrive on their own. The scientific display cabinet —its order, its labels, its promise of objectivity— can produce an illusion: that matter exists as neutral evidence, detached from the historical and political conditions that make its extraction, transport, classification, and exhibition possible. In reality, many minerals are also traces of infrastructures: mines, routes, refineries, markets; and of extractivist impacts unevenly distributed across territories and bodies.
This exhibition introduces a different kind of mediation: pieces by artist and jeweler Teresa Estapé that bring geology into the intimate space of the body. The transscalar here is not a romantic passage from the small to the immense, but a full circuit that connects hand–skin–chest with vein–workshop–economy. The jewel appears as an interface: it does not “decorate” matter, but renders it open to question. What does it mean to wear a mineral? What relationships —environmental, labor-related, colonial, affective— are condensed in that gesture?
Estapé’s series take up that question, one by one, putting it under tension. Talc and diamond bring together physical and symbolic extremes, turning a mineral scale into a tactile experience. Pyrite unsettles the narrative of gold: shine no longer guarantees prestige, and mineral geometry takes center stage. Jet shifts time from that of the commodity to that of mourning: a jewel that does not celebrate success, but accompanies loss and change, and claims social space to remain present.
In this context, the museum “opens” itself to a contemporary proposal in order to activate a public conversation around extractivism and value. The display cabinet is not undone; it is made more complex. The intimate piece is not idealized; it is politicized. Between geology and body, what emerges is not a metaphor, but an urgent question: how to inhabit a material world without continuing to treat it as an unlimited resource.
Olga Subirós
