When the sun burstst / when will the sun die?
MAITE DE ORBE
(b. Madrid 1997) Spanish artist based in London, blending documentary, fine art and fashion to tell stories of real life through emotional textures, portraits and landscapes. Their work is equally raw and soft, deeply connected and fascinated with intimacy, identity and the sublime.
“traces” (2022– )
Documentation of one of the first performances of traces during the opening of the exhibion ‘a moment opposite to blindness’ in London. Asking people to embrace, I trace the physical texture of their hug through fabric and chalk. The image gets revelaed in front of the audience, as it would in the darkroom with the developer, only that this is a shared experience that invites audience to hold the intimacy of the work.
During this specific performance, I invited Mahsa and Moran to hug, two best friends that are from Iran and Palestine restrospectively. While the act of tracing was taking place, they sang and spoke to each other in their mother tongues, Farsi and Arabic. Not fully understanding each other, there was still a sense of communication and communion through tone and laughter. This was an invitation to understand each other that the audience witnessed and held through their presence.
These public try-outs have encouraged me to push this performance practice further, to be developed in ICA 2026 residency.
MOMOSTAR
Born out of the torn rim wheel of a car crash, MOMOSTAR is a vessel of entropic perversion, the thickness of heat in a dancefloor, the sublimation of violence, your personal mirror of stripped desire.
MOMOSTAR performs with a naked chest fully covered in sticker stars, acting as a weak shield, half innocent half luring, reflecting and refracting the light, or the gaze, becoming a mirror of your projection and a healing process of gender expression and movement, that to inhabit otherness is possible. Operating as an opaque, projected character exploring violence, tenderness, gender, belief systems, mythology and contemporary symbols, it is a surreal exercise to really see oneself.
MOMOSTAR: LOS ANHELOS
(Performed @ Reference Point, April 2026)
(Performed @ Reference Point, April 2026)
Los Anhelos (Spanish for “longing”) unfolds through four central desires that shape the MOMOSTAR figure: the release of trauma, the hunger for attention, indulgence, and the impulse toward unity. Drawing on mythological archetypes, these drives are embodied through a sequence of actions, with the star as a symbolic vessel guiding each transformation.
Directed by Maite de Orbe @maitedeorbe
Performed by Virginia Lopez Valera @molar.28 María Abad @averybadmaria Jackie Lipman @jaka_bby Yasemin Junqueira @yasfantastic Jayda Dawkins @jayda_ang
with sound by Lolo & Sosaku @loloysosaku and Vivienne Griffin @vivienne.griffin
Rehersal documentation
“I wanted to explore why we need to believe in things, why we need pop stars to live crazy lives for us, why we need movements to follow and how all the above are, again, vessels of security, pulling from symbols of contemporary society. In a time where we don’t look up to mythology anymore, we’ve created new gods, in the constant fear of what actual freedom might look like.
When I started performing as MOMOSTAR I was still a photographer, and I still am, but felt the creative impulse to make images that would live, rather than being immortalised. I wanted to make an image with an audience, to not just see it, but embody it. MOMOSTAR is a photographic experience taken into ephemerality.”
MOMOSTAR: FIRST DAY ON EARTH is the birth of MOMOSTAR into a world where they need to figure out how to move, body unfamiliar to the space, a choreography of near-belonging, negotiating identity within environment.
Seen by Jessica Madavo, MOMOSTAR uses gaze as a tool, entering an infinity mirror, subverting the one directionness of photography, building identity with multiplicity.
A MOMENT OPPOSITE TO BLINDNESS
(London / Dominican Republic solo exhibition, 2025)
(London / Dominican Republic solo exhibition, 2025)
‘A moment opposite to blindness’ is Maite de Orbe’s first solo exhibition in London, showcasing a body of work from 2022-2025 spanning material shot between the Dominican Republic, Chile, UK, Spain, Mexico and The Gambia. Across these locations, Maite chases suspended emotions in landscapes, portraits and details.
The series is a gesture of surrender to the grief of the world we live in, while investigating recurring topics of obsession – performers, desolate deserts, religious iconography, sex work, car crashes, ballroom, and lovers and friends. Taking its title from Anne Carson’s ‘Autobiography of Red’, which loosely transposes the Greek myth of Geryon and Heracles into a modern setting and romantic tension, ‘a moment opposite to blindness’ aims to capture raw and tender intimacy.
The exhibition travelled to CCESD in the Dominican Republic in November 2025.
Exhibition text:
NOTES ON ENTROPY AND SURRENDER BY CLARA DUBLANC
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