DRIVE

Solo-exhibition
Institut d'Estudis Ilerdencs (IEI Lleida - Sala Gotika)
22.05.2025 - 20.07.2025

DRIVE is the accumulation of a year of work and exploration. Following the award from the Embarrat Festival in Tàrrega, I set out to continue investigating found and second-hand materials and their regenerative potential. Over the following year, I accumulated what is often labeled as “trash” [discarded objects, textiles, and remnants] to build an environment that questions how we assign value, where we place our attention, and how we might engage with our surroundings differently.

In an earlier project in L’Escala, I explored ideas of power, success, and failure by constructing a ladder that could not realistically take you to the top. With DRIVE, I wanted to extend this logic: to create a car that could not take you from point A to point B. Instead, the car is suspended somewhere in between, in the present.

While constructing this car, I felt an increasing tension between process and outcome. If my attention was fixed on the final object, where was I actually located in that journey? The next day, I left Barcelona and my studio, my work, with only a backpack, a tent, a sleeping bag, and my shoes. The intention was simple: to inhabit the space of the “now,” between departure and arrival.

I spent fourteen days hitchhiking across Spain, deeply engaged in the lives, conversations, and movements of the people who picked me up. Along the way, I collected objects and textiles, allowing chance encounters and generosity to shape the material and conceptual direction of the work.

This journey became a necessary pause, a reality check, a soft stop, a deep breath. Returning to the studio, I was able to complete the car for the exhibition: a vehicle that does not move, but instead asks us to look out the window, and down, toward what sits at the side of the road. It invites attention to the overlooked, the peripheral, and the continuous present moment.

The accumulation of materials, stories, and histories within DRIVE continues a cycle of reuse and transformation, one that resists linear progress and instead dwells in duration, presence, and care.

A car becomes a vehicle for the soul.

Clues along the road offer signs and structure.

Discarded matter turns into treasure.

I recognize the objects — we’ve met in other lives too.

The dialogue is close, almost like a caress.

I listen, I observe.

I surrender to the journey, trusting that my shoes carry the key to unlock the doors of this adventure.

At the center, a spiral — an energy core. This is where the journey begins, or perhaps continues. Its shape challenges urgency and linearity, offering instead the rhythm of discovery, detour, and presence. The spiral repeats, transforms, expands. It signals a cycle that must end to allow new landscapes and stories to emerge.

In this path, trust is the engine.

Like a light traveler, Kirra lets herself be carried. Every found object is a clue, a conversation. Forgotten materials offer direction.

The larger pieces — sewn by hand from gathered textiles and surrounding objects — reveal the gesture of union: the fragility of what is assembled, the strength of what is reimagined, the beauty of transforming what was left behind.

The work unfolds in motion.

There is no map in advance; it is the journey that sets the course.

It is not about arriving, but about embracing the body as a sensitive vessel in the process.

Drive is not just an exhibition: it is a way of moving forward without a plan. A way of reading the world through what the path offers.

Text by Violeto

Sun door
Found textile, found objects
156x 165 cm
2025

Kelly’s Jeans
Found textile
183 x 170 cm
2025

R.Mossen, Jancint Verdaguer
Found textile, found objects
337 x 200 cm
2025

This work developed over approximately ten months, though the material history embedded in the textile extends far beyond the duration of its construction. The piece originates from a discarded carrier sack found in La Floresta, outside of Barcelona. Worn through prior use, the textile was collected and brought into the studio, where it initially functioned as a transitional object before entering the artistic process.

As part of the research, the printed text on the fabric — “R. Mossèn / Jacint Verdaguer, 82” — was investigated. This led to Mossèn Jacint Verdaguer (1845–1902), a Catalan poet and central figure of the Renaixença movement. In 1882, Verdaguer published Canigó, an epic poem focused on landscape, mythology, and collective memory. An excerpt from the poem reads:

“Lo Canigó és una muntanya altíssima,
tota blanca de neu, tota olorosa de flors;
és una muntanya que sembla la cabellera
d’un gegant adormit.”

Translation:
“Canigó is a lofty mountain, all white with snow, all fragrant with flowers; it is a mountain that seems like the flowing hair of a sleeping giant.”

The work incorporates additional elements, including a fan and gloves collected while hitchhiking across Spain, extending the cycle of movement, use, and accumulation. Through material layering and research, the piece brings together found histories, poetic references, and lived experience.

Key & Window
Found objects, textile, thread
36 x 34 cm
February 2025

Window, 2025

Key, 2025

Next to my studio in Zona Franca, Hospitalet, was a car repair warehouse. I became friends with the woman who worked there, and she let me take scraps from cars that were going to be discarded.

Sun to Moon
Found textile
222 x 165 cm
2025

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KIRRA KUSY

©2026 kirra kusy

DRIVE