Ghosts, memory and the fragile world

A conversation with Marcella Barceló and Kendell Geers on impermanence, imagination, and our uneasy relationship with nature.

Marcella Barceló’s work emerges from a world that is at once intimate and unsettled. Drawing on childhood memory, inner visions, and the landscapes of her native Mallorca, she creates paintings and sculptures that feel like mindscapes—spaces where figures, animals and symbols drift between presence and disappearance.

Growing up on an island shaped by mass tourism, Barceló witnessed firsthand the tension between human desire and fragile ecosystems. That tension runs quietly through her work. Nature appears not as scenery, but as something haunted—by memory, by loss, by human intervention. Influenced by Japanese aesthetics, myth, folklore, and her own Tarot practice, she gives form to what is fleeting: emotions, visions, and states of becoming.

In this edition of Art Matters, artist and Art Matters founder Kendell Geers invites Barceló to reflect on how art can speak about impermanence without nostalgia, and about beauty without denial. What does it mean to make poetic work in a world defined by extraction, acceleration, and ecological strain? And how can imagination become a way of staying with fragility rather than escaping it?