Independent curator and writer, Rafa Barber Cortell lives and works between London and Madrid. Through fiction and essay, and by exploring new exhibition and discursive formats, his practice seeks new ways to construct alternative imaginaries through art. He has worked as Associate Editor for Concreta, as well as for the editorial platform Afterall in London. His texts and interviews have been published in ADesk*, Concreta, this is tomorrow, and Frieze.

Among his recent curatorial projects are Simone Fattal, Suspension of Disbelief at IVAM; Fantástico interior, a cycle of four exhibitions held at La Casa Encendida in 2022; and Absolute Beginners, a cycle of exhibitions presented at CentroCentro between 2019 and 2020.

In 2018, he earned a Master's degree in Curating from the Royal College of Art in London, supported by a Botín Foundation scholarship. He is currently pursuing doctoral studies at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid.

Launch Pad LaB 2025

During my visit to Launch Pad LaB, I stepped into three very different studio environments, each shaped by a distinct artistic language, yet all quietly resonating with a shared attention to what is absent, intangible, or just out of reach. In the work of Florence Peake, Ana Gzirishvili, and ektor garcía, absence takes on a material presence — not as a void to be filled, but as something that leaves a mark, a trace. Whether through gestures of mourning, acts of transformation, or intimate forms of making, each artist finds ways to work with what cannot be fully grasped. Materials such as plaster, leather, and thread become vessels for memory — carriers of what’s missing, what’s felt, what resists being named.

Across their practices, craft emerges as something more than method — it is a form of connection, an embodied kind of thinking, rooted in care and repetition. There is a quiet persistence in the way they shape, mold, stitch, and assemble — as if the act of making were itself a way of holding on. Peake’s pieces speak of loss without spectacle, Gzirishvili’s constructions shift between ruin and renewal, and garcía’s tactile objects evoke stories passed through hands rather than words. Their works don’t claim to resolve absence, but rather to live alongside it — suggesting that fragility, far from being a weakness, might be the ground from which new forms of presence emerge.

Rafa Barber Cortell