Micaela Maisa’s exhibition “I’ve Come to Tell You What I Saw” at the La Posta Foundation invites us to explore the complexity of the gaze in contemporary culture. Maisa, an Argentine artist living in Valencia, unfolds a project that traverses optics, light, and the eye, questioning the mechanisms of vision and their role in the construction of subjectivity and power. In a hypervisual world saturated with images and optical devices, the artist invites us to pause and reconsider perception, exploring both what is shown and what remains hidden.
The exhibition is organized into three interrelated nuclei that address vision as technology, affect, and ritual. Through lenses and optical devices, “Optics and Metaphor” (2024) dismantles the illusion of an objective gaze and confronts us with perceptual bias, in tune with Haraway’s situated knowledge. In “Beware the Stare” (2019), Maisa draws on cinematic codes and feminist critiques to highlight the violence inscribed in the male gaze, proposing the tear as a sensitive and political interruption. Finally, “Remedies for the evil eye” (2021) revisits popular knowledge and protective materials—eyes, tassels, amulets—to consider the gaze as an ambivalent power, capable of both wounding and healing.
As a whole, the exhibition is an invitation to look again, to linger on the details that often go unnoticed, and to recognize the mystery that dwells in the everyday. Maisa challenges us to consider the gaze not only as an act of seeing, but as a process steeped in history, power, and sensitivity, where the occult and the mystical intertwine with the banal and the everyday. Thus, “I’ve Come to Tell You What I Saw” becomes a space for introspection and wonder, where each viewer is invited to discover their own way of seeing and being seen.
Alejandro Mañas García
Curator and professor at the Polytechnic University of Valencia.
Micaela Maisa (Buenos Aires, 1989) is a visual artist and researcher. Born in Argentina and based in Valencia, her background combines studies in Sociology (Buenos Aires) and Fine Arts at the Polytechnic University of Valencia, where she also completed a Master’s in Artistic Production. She is currently pursuing her doctorate at the same university with an FPU scholarship from the Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities.
Her research revolves around the gaze and the visual as forms of relationship with the environment and with others, exploring how these notions have been addressed in contemporary art. Her practice develops through media such as installation, video, collage, and writing, from an interdisciplinary perspective.
She has participated in group exhibitions and screening programs at institutions such as IVAM, La Casa Encendida, Centre del Carme, and Bienal Dona i Cinema, and has held a solo exhibition at the Chirivella Soriano Foundation. Her work is based on a critical reflection on the visual experience, the interpersonal gaze, and the devices that traverse them.