Lúa Coderch: exhausted and exuberant

A robot that learns to speak from what you tell her, a hundred break-up phrases, and 1024 thumbtacks with the same emoji hand-painted over and over again, are some of the pieces that make up exhausted and exuberant. Using unconventional formats, this exhibition investigates the difficulties in forming a language for how we take care of ourselves and how we take care of others. Lúa Coderch’s first solo show at The RYDER Projects also inaugurates the new phase of the duo formed by Carmen Lael Hines and Roberto Majano as curators of the gallery.

Echo is a body that listens, a body that speaks, a body that “thinks”. Echo (the couch one) is an open source sculpture that connects the figure of the Greek nymph with psychotherapy and robotics. Her ability to learn and to speak from what she hears brings her closer to the human process of language acquisition. Her programming, based on the randomness of fragmented learning, allows her to generate sentences that can be incongruous or disconnected, but also surprising, or “intelligent.”

Reaction (smile with tear, 1 kB) is a set of tiny expressions that allows us to visualize the 1.024 bytes that compose a 1kB. This mass of emojis painted on thumbtacks, establishes a link with the closest digital storage unit to what occupies a short story (150 – 200 words). Technological scale and processing are visualized through emoji as a narrative act, a system of communication that is simultaneously precise and ambiguous.

We can still be friends is an audio piece that brings together breakup phrases Lúa Coderch compiled over the years through conversations with her friends. As part of this same corpus, Sore Throat presents these statements together with images of plants that have properties to cure sore throat or mouth pain. Lips also form part of iconography of the exhibition, either as a symbol of containment in S/T (the girl with no door on her mouth) or as a narrative vehicle in the video Not I. Finally, Cold Reading presents a series based on strategies used by mediums and psychics to gain people’s trust when “reading their mind.”

Lúa Coderch explores how language structures endow our lives with meaning, alongside the tensions and paradoxes we find in rigid grammar and pre-established vocabulary. Through a selection of works made between 2018 and 2025, the artist reflects on a society marked by the corporatization of affective, spiritual and caring life. In the difficulty of finding the exact word to express our emotions, Coderch finds the starting point for critical exploration from a delicate and insightful positionality.

Until 15 March

On the cover: Image: Lúa Coderch, Echo (The Couch One), 2022. Upholstered structure, artificial hair, Raspberry Pi, speaker, microphone. 120 x 277 x 60 cm. Unique

Source: The RYDER Projects