Ñam, Ñam
(Yum, Yum)
MUSAC (Museo de Arte Contemporáneo
de Castilla y León) León, Spain
Part of exhibition: Is There No Place Like Home?
Feb 2026 -Feb 2027
Following the birth of her first child in June 2024, Alonso presents a project at MUSAC that explores motherhood and child-rearing from an expanded perspective. When her daughter Carmen turned six months old and began eating solid foods, Alonso started photographing her mealtime rituals. What began as a record of gestures in response to the discovery of taste became an attempt to capture change itself: the kind that slips by imperceptibly when life unfolds mostly at home.
This archive, spanning Carmen’s age from six to twenty-four months, is the raw material of the work. The images are transferred onto cyanotypes from which the food and the original stains have been removed, then worked over with colour monotypes conceived as plastic expressions of flavour and the memory of gesture. Each print is a 30 cm circle, roughly the size of a pasta plate. The paper is moulded with wheat paste (flour and water) over ceramic plates from the artist’s own kitchen, so that the image becomes a sculptural object. On the wall, the effect is of hanging plates: iterations of a single process, the ritual of the meal.
The installation brings together 140 unique pieces, arranged at random like fragments of suspended time. Its composition draws on the flight of a murmuration of starlings and on the temporal drift that is motherhood. Because it follows no sequence, the arrangement rules out a fixed chronology and heightens disorientation, inviting viewers to experience the silent drift of care.
“Domestic life affects memory in a particular way: the inhabited space becomes an extension of the body, and the repetition of gestures, such as eating in the same chair at the same time each day, dissolves the boundaries between yesterday and tomorrow. At home, time does not pass: it dissolves.
To inhabit the home, to be aware of time passing within the family and to prioritise connection thus becomes an act of resistance against a system that measures value by productivity and punishes pause and care.
ÑamÑam proposes another temporality, one of bonds and full attention, where the everyday is an act as intimate as it is political and creative: a cartography of change and of being-with as a radical experience of presence.”
-Sara Alonso
To inhabit the home, to be aware of time passing within the family and to prioritise connection thus becomes an act of resistance against a system that measures value by productivity and punishes pause and care.
ÑamÑam proposes another temporality, one of bonds and full attention, where the everyday is an act as intimate as it is political and creative: a cartography of change and of being-with as a radical experience of presence.”
-Sara Alonso
Curatorship: Monserrat Pis Marcos
In recent years, access to housing, the difficulty of gaining financial independence, rural depopulation, internal and external migration, and changing models of coexistence are profoundly reshaping what it means to inhabit a space. Intense and prolonged periods of cohabitation—whether driven by economic pressures, social dynamics or personal circumstances—have revealed tensions, contradictions and vulnerabilities inherent to the idea of home. For some, it is a place of refuge and safety; for others, it can become a space of constraint, insecurity or exclusion.
Is There No Place Like Home? questions this dogma at a time when housing has emerged as one of the primary social concerns in Spain. The exhibition examines the concept of home as something unstable and multifaceted, shaped by social conditions, cultural expectations, emotional experiences and lived realities. Combining wall-based works, installations and audiovisual material, the show explores this notion from multiple angles: the missed or unattainable home, the idealised home, the physical and the mental home, the fragile home, the dangerous home and the unstable home. The wide range of artistic perspectives included in the MUSAC collection is complemented by four newly commissioned contemporary interventions that will be added to the exhibition in the course of 2026, produced by Cestola (Xoana Almar and Miguel Peralta), Tito Pérez Mora, Sara Alonso and Lara Ruiz. This constellation of viewpoints also considers those without a home, those who have left home behind, and those who seek or reinvent home.