Abstract
<jats:p>In January 2025, the Chema Cobo Exhibition Hall at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Málaga presented Un gesto, un objeto, un habla (A Gesture, an Object, a Speech), a solo exhibition by Marta Iranzo curated by Jesús Palomino and Jorge Montalbán. The exhibition is articulated around the collective imaginary surrounding the so-called "ola del melillero" (the Melilla ferry wave)—a common phenomenon for those who frequent the beaches of Málaga, yet charged with a symbolic power that goes beyond its literal dimension. Each time the vessel arriving from Melilla approaches the port, it produces a wave that fleetingly alters the shoreline. This cyclical occurrence harbors a poetics of repetition, disruption, and transformation. Thus, the wave turns into a myth, a sort of "speech" (parole) in the Barthesian sense, capable of transforming the everyday into a web of meanings. The melillero ceases to be merely a ship in transit to become a symbolic vehicle suggesting the possibility of a tsunami capable of overflowing the boundaries of the landscape. How do we inhabit a completely flooded landscape of soft shapes? Starting from this localized event experienced as a fleeting inundation, the exhibition unfolds a narrative that explores how certain gestures acquire mythical resonances and open up new ways of inhabiting space. Here, the gesture appears as a minimal unit of action capable of activating latent narratives within objects and materials. The show brings together a set of installations and devices that bring seemingly simple fragments, remains, or structures into dialogue, producing open readings on territory, language, and memory. Like fragments of an ever-unfinished symbolic map, the viewer is invited to navigate an uncertain territory. In this way, the exhibition route is configured as a drift through signs, where objects, forms, and actions become mediators of a narrative that remains flooded.</jats:p>