Luca Calderó
Medium-term residency
February - July 2025
Luca Calderó. Barcelona, 1999
Luca Calderó (they) is an artist-researcher. Their practice brings together and establishes relationships between distant or contradictory elements, creating possibilities in places of tension or desertification. Using disengagement as a tool for artistic research, he proposes to occupy spaces where his identity is simultaneously questioned and affirmed, such as a monastery or a surf camp.
They start from their own trans*planted corporeality to engage with the politicisation of the sick body in relation to queer identity and disability. Through embodied research, born out of corporeality and incorporating somatic processes, their work explores the intersections between dissidence and chronic illness, hospital architecture and the politicisation of parts of the body where the light does not reach, proposing affective and transfeminist connections to organs.
Drawing on previous research into anti-capacity and transfeminist approaches to the sick body as a theoretical framework, they are currently engaged in an extended writing exercise that takes as its starting point Simone Weil’s idea of the ulcer as a concept that harbours the fragility and impermanence of the physical body and the depths it reveals within us. This work explores a personal, dissident and transdisciplinary approach to mysticism. Their processes are materialised in moving image, text, performance and installation.
Luca is completing a degree in Fine Arts at the University of Barcelona. They received the Art Jove Creació Award (2023) and has presented performances at MACBA as part of the Distensions programme (2023) and at Espai Nyamnyam as part of the Les paraules fallen cycle (Mieres, 2023).They have exhibited at Sala de Art Jove (Barcelona, 2023) and Punt WG (Amsterdam, 2025). They curated the exhibition Other trash: stop theatre at the Fundació Joan Brossa as part of the Curatorial Research Programme and was a mediator for Manifesta 15. They are currently developing the project Ens van caldre les úlceres with the Barcelona Crea Grant in collaboration with the Fundació Joan Brossa.
