Ileana Ramírez Romero’s project traces a constellation of gestures that navigate the complex threshold between limits and borders
© Ileana Ramírez Romero
September 27 – November 2, 2025 | FABRIKculture, Hégenheim
FABRIKculture is pleased to present Unbound Realms, a group exhibition curated by Venezuelan curator Ileana Ramírez Romero, on view from September 27 to November 2, 2025, in Hégenheim, France. The exhibition opens on Saturday, September 27, with a performance by Katherine Newton and a live DJ session by Rubén Bañuelos.
Unbound Realms explores the porous nature of borders and belonging, bringing together works that challenge territorial, cultural, and biological boundaries as dynamic, ever-shifting thresholds. Inspired by Alejo Carpentier’s The Kingdom of This World and The Lost Steps, the exhibition proposes a speculative
cartography—where change is not rupture, but a continuous act of becoming.
The exhibition features artworks by Axel Töpfer & Jo Preußler, Daniela Brugger, Javier Grajales, Joana Amora, Juan José Olavarría, Katherine Newton, Luisanna González Quattrini, Raily Yance, Raphael Reichert, Rubén Bañuelos, Suwon Lee, and Parque Industrial. Each artist contributes a distinct perspective—through sonic cartographies, speculative archives, ecological rituals, and poetic displacements. Together, they form a collective exploration of what it means to move through, and beyond, borders.
Many of the participating artists work across and between geographies, shaped by the realities of migration, displacement, and reinvention. Their practices reflect the precarity of belonging and the ongoing negotiation of meaning in a world in flux.
Water, Language, and Other Disruptions
Water appears throughout the exhibition as both material and metaphor. It carries memory, crosses borders, and marks ecological urgency. In some works, it becomes a medium for sonic mapping or data visualization; in others, it evokes loss, migration, or the instability of home. A recurring image—a flood dragging a house from its foundations, drawn from The Lost Steps—captures the tension
between rupture and renewal. Language is equally unstable. Text is carved into surfaces, erased, translated, and suspended mid-air. These gestures speak to the fragility of communication and the struggle between naming and forgetting. One installation inscribes literary fragments directly into the ground—exposed and ephemeral—suggesting that even meaning itself is always at risk.
Time and memory echo through symbols: clocks that mark suspended time, flags of countries that no longer exist, and archival traces that hint at interrupted histories and imagined futures. These motifs reflect the disorientation of transitory life and the quiet resistance of those who refuse to be fixed in place.
Non-Human Presence and Other Ways of Knowing
The exhibition also expands beyond the human. Animals, ecosystems, and digital entities are not metaphors—they are collaborators, witnesses, and agents in their own right. Their presence challenges the primacy of human narratives and opens new ways of thinking about kinship, territory, and interdependence. In this liminal space—where fiction and reality blur—Unbound Realms becomes both a method of critical inquiry and an act of aesthetic resistance. It questions the very idea of permanence, of canon, and of reality as a fixed state.
Here, symbols dissolve, language flows and erodes, and the boundaries between nature, culture, and survival are constantly redefined. Rather than offering fixed answers, the exhibition opens a space for reflection and dialogue. It invites viewers to consider how art can navigate uncertainty, hold complexity, and imagine new forms of connection.
Visual identity and design
Ira Leon
Program Highlights
Vernissage
Sept 27– 14.00 – 21.00hrs
18:00 – Performance [ocean.way] by Katherine Newton
19:00 – Live DJ Session with Rubén Bañuelos
Oct 5 –
14.00hrs Guided tour
15.00hrs Livestreamed from Caracas / screened in situ performance by Parque
Industrial
Oct 12 –
14.00hrs
Screening Dicté/Exilé videoperformance by Suwon Lee
Oct 19 –
Guided tour 14.00hrs
Oct 26
Walking field “borderscapes and Ghosts” of the Checkpoint abandoned house. A
site-responsive walk accompanied by Clément Stehlin along the porous edges of
Hégenheim and the Franco-Swiss border.
Finissage
Nov 2
– 14.00hrs
Keynote and OUTRO/SANGRE BUENA NUNCA SECA a sound-performance by
Rubén Bañuelos.
Opening hours
Saturdays and Sundays 11:00 to 17:00hrs
