SOBREMESA

Art Exhibition / Performance
Ghent, Belgium · 2024

SOBREMESA, by Helena Martínez García and Sara Iraburu, is a bilingual poetry and illustration project that explores the quiet significance of the time after a meal—when conversations soften, gestures slow, and the table becomes a place where memories settle. Rooted in the Spanish notion of sobremesa, this work captures the intimacy of staying together just a little longer, letting the warmth of shared time linger.

First exhibited at De Krook Bibliotheek in February 2024, the collection brings together poems by Helena Martínez, illustrations by Sara Iraburu, and English translations by Izaro Lozano. What began as a small zine transformed into a wider artistic offering: an attempt to hold on to what usually disappears—the laughter, the crumbs, the pauses, the stories that refuse to be rushed.

Through drawing and poetry, SOBREMESA turns the table into a landscape of care, hunger, memory, and attention. It is an invitation to sit down, to share an orange, to rest your hands where others have rested theirs. A table extended across distance, welcoming anyone who wishes to arrive.

SOBREMESA invites you to eat, to speak, to crave, to read, to get your hands dirty, to finish the last crumbs—and above all, to feel.

Permanent Photography Exhibition 
Madrid, Spain · 2022

Azules began as a photographic essay about the invisible: the women who cleaned the residence where I lived. Every day they moved quietly through the hallways—unseen, unthanked, yet carrying the weight of a place that only functioned because of them. Photographing them became a gesture of gratitude, a way of saying I see you.

What started during a COVID confinement—a brief encounter, a warm conversation through the doorway, the unexpected comfort of being cared for by a stranger—grew into a long, deliberate process of listening. For a month, I joined the cleaning team during their shifts. I watched how they worked: fierce, kind, and essential, like lionesses. Slowly, the project unfolded into a visual language that moved from abstraction to recognition: first traces of color, then shapes, and finally portraits where names and faces found their place.

Now permanently displayed at the Erasmo Residence of the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Azules is a tribute to their strength and to all the invisible care that keeps spaces alive. Through fourteen images—some large, others divided into quiet series—the exhibition creates a soft dialogue between residents and the people who look after them, inviting us to pay attention, to acknowledge, and to meet the gaze of those who are so often overlooked.

Azules is, above all, a thank-you. A reminder that behind every clean surface, there is a story, a pair of hands, and a person worth seeing.



Interview for RESA Erasmo

Photography Exhibition 
Pamplona/Iruña, Spain · 2018

Monocromo was my first exhibition, created when I was seventeen. I wanted to strip everything down—no colour, no distraction—just light, shadow, and the quiet space in between. Across three walls, I placed portraits of people, animals, and familiar places, each captured in stillness, observed without interference or rush. The old bus station of Pamplona, where the work was displayed, became part of the experience: a place of echoes, pauses, and fleeting passages.

With Monocromo, I learned to look more slowly, to give weight to the simple, and to find poetry in what usually slips by unnoticed. It was my first attempt at understanding the world through minimal gestures, trusting that even the smallest moment can hold an entire story.