XII

Sleeping, turning in turn like planets

rotating in their midnight meadow:

a touch is enough to let us know

we’re not alone in the universe, even in sleep:

the dream-ghosts of two worlds

walking their ghost-towns, almost address each other.

I’ve wakened to your muttered words

spoken light- or dark-years away,

as if my own voice had spoken.

But we have different voices, even in sleep,

and our bodies, so alike, are yet so different

and the past echoing through our bloodstreams

is freighted with different language, different meanings—

though in any chronicle of the world we share

it could be written with new meaning

we were two lovers of one gender,

we were two women of one generation.

Adrienne Rich, Twenty One Poems, 1974-1977

Turn like planets rotating in their midnight meadow is an exhibition that explores the affections an disaffections between women through the practices of a group of contemporary visual artists. Their work explores the sensitive territories from an Emil perspective, attentive to experience, memory and affective genealogies.

The exhibition is organized around four resonant frameworks: In illo tempore, in the lesbian continuum, specific and indivisible directness. These axis doesn´t work like the closed categories, but more like porous fields where they overlap with times, bodies, stories and affections. A relational forest where in which the looks of pioneering female photographers, like Alice Austin, Theresa Parker Babb o Germaine Krull, engage in dialogue - the Greek and Aztec mythology -  the Thesmophoria or la Patlache-, the bookshop on Rue Jacob in Paris during the Belle Époque, the students of the Mount Holyoke College de Massachusetts, and the room o Puri and Begoña at the Board of Protection of Women, in Madrid in the 1980s.

From the dedication torn out from the book to the pain of separation; from the invisibility in the melodrama of the American cinema to the affirmation of photographic portrait; from the eroticism in the room of the Weimar Republic to the affective deconstruction of the stone butch; from the plants in the Emily Dickenson´s herbarium to the spiritualism and the beads on the Andalusian curtains. A pomegranate cut in two: Siamese or foreign? Women who live, who grow up together - friends, friends-lovers, lovers, not friends -  are weaving a constellation of possible connections.

The exhibition proposes experimental and sensory spaces where the vulnerable and powerful coexist. Places of resonance that run through the Eros, dream and the hedonistic shift; the love, the friendship and rejection; the ancestral and the fragmented; the fetish object as a memory; the territories of invisibility and the revelation. Stories of life and genealogies that intertwine the present and the past, feelings that endure and pass through us, intimate and universal, unfolding between bodies and times.

The opening of the exhibition Girar como planetas que rotan en su prado nocturno. Espacios de afectividad entre mujeres will take place at the Estudi General hall of Centre Cultural La Nau on March 10, 2026, at 6:00 p.m.

On the occasion of the exhibition, at 7:30 p.m., the performance Botánicas – Herbarium to E. D. by the artist Yera Moreno will be presented.

This exhibition is part of the programme The Value of Diversity: Art, Restitution and Memory, which is being developed within the framework of the University of Valencia's commitment to human rights, social justice and social inclusion. It brings together artistic discourses and practices that engage in dialogue around three fundamental themes: cultural diversity, the restitution of heritage and the construction of collective memory.