Artist Irene Molina opens her exhibition Máquinas deseantes (Desiring Machines) at Galería Río y Meñaka (Conde de Aranda 20, Madrid). The exhibition will be open to the public from 11 September to 10 October 2025 as part of Apertura Madrid Gallery Weekend, the event that transforms the capital into the international epicentre of contemporary art every autumn.
The project is part of research that Irene Molina has been conducting in recent years on the relationship between the digital, the material and the affective. The exhibition takes its title from the notion of desiring machines formulated by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, understood as devices that never cease to produce connections, flows and transformations. But in Molina’s case, this idea shifts to the realm of the post-digital: a present in which technologies are no longer conceived as abstract mediations, but as physical and tangible infrastructures that sustain everyday life.
The cloud, that cultural imaginary we associate with lightness and vaporousness, appears here demystified. As the artist reminds us, the digital has a body: it occupies space in industrial warehouses, consumes energy, breathes through fans and is organised in endless corridors of metal racks. The works that make up ‘Máquinas deseantes’ (Desiring Machines) are born in this hidden territory: before becoming sculptures, they were data stored on servers, virtual polygons, lines of code circulating through submarine cables and hard drives.
The transition from archive to object, from virtual to physical, forms the core of the exhibition. The pieces condense information into matter, folding like muscles, multiplying like organisms and intertwining like gestures. Each sculpture functions as an interface that translates digital inputs into material outputs: a system that, although opaque on the inside, produces sensitive forms, palpable surfaces and sculptural presences.
In this sense, Irene Molina’s work explores the affective dimension of technology. Her objects not only come from a common archive in constant circulation, that endless flow of images that appear on screens with the promise of the most tender moment of the day, but also embody a desire oriented towards what does not yet exist. Desiderare, in Latin, meant precisely to feel the absence of the stars: it was used when a navigator, looking at the sky, could not find the sign he was expecting. It was a longing guided by astronomy: to wait for something that shines far away and has not yet arrived. Molina’s sculptures are situated in that intermediate space between what is already archive and what is still promise, between the industrial cloud and the materiality of a searching body.
The exhibition unfolds like a living, expanding system. Each work is a node that connects with the rest, a moving cog that leaves traces, opens passages and guides new forms of desire. In the gallery space, this sculptural ecosystem turns the intangible into the tangible, the industrial into the intimate, the technological into the organic. Desiring Machines is both a reflection on the digital present and an invitation to imagine futures where the virtual and the material no longer oppose each other, but coexist like skin and fold, like flow and volume, like archive and star.
Galería Río y Meñaka, Madrid
11.09.25 – 10.10.25
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