VITAL FEAST

Part of the PROJECT: DIBUJA EN EL TIEMPO – Draw in time: Synchronic Impressions from Territorial Strokes & Traces.

23 04 2026

Concept by Karla Peralta Málaga Senior Art Curator

There is a force that does not live inside a single body. It lives between time in the moment of contact, of being fully present. It circulates through celebration, through the joy and warmth of coming together without hierarchy. Everyone gathered in the same place to receive and celebrate. The feast, the act of receiving, as the great equaliser. This is the force that art carries. Not as metaphor, as fact. In 1615, the chronicler Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala assigned the word camai, vital force, to the month of April. His description of that month was not philosophical. It was visceral: feasting, singing, playing, the body replenished, abundance shared equally among all of these manifestations. The force was not an idea. It was what happened when people came together and let something circulate between them. It still happens today. VITAL FEAST takes that gesture as its starting point. We are looking for artists whose work understands the encounter between art and viewer as an act of transmission. Something passes. Something animates. The work does not end at its visual edges it continues in the body of the person who receives it, in the eye of the beholder.

Camai does not move in one direction, it circulates. The artist transmits force into the work. The work carries it to the beholder. The beholder becomes a source of force in return. Nobody at this table, in this space, is only giver or only receiver. This is what art has always been: a feast in which no one leaves unchanged. You witness to transform.

We welcome works that leave something behind, a residue of energy, a shift in the body, a warmth that remains in perpetuity. Artworks eager to portray the vital force, camai, that circulates between beings. Camai belongs to every practice that has ever understood art as something that passes between energies and changes them. A force that understands art as transmission of energy. Any scale. Any geography.