Jorge Satorre’s exhibition “Ria” — titled after the tidal inlets found along Spain’s northwest coast, including the one that cuts through his home city of Bilbao — brings together work from the past decade. “Río” (River), the accompanying monograph, also includes earlier projects. This month’s Cover Story features 16 different shots of the book, co-published by Museo CA2M and Caniche Editorial, and designed by Gabriel Pericàs. Reload the page to see more.

With the subtitle “selection of exhibitions and works (2011-2025)”, the publication’s chronological structure is nevertheless deliberately inverted. It begins with the most recent works — “Triplay” and “Wrecking the Floor Tiles (Gates)” — both of which appear in the exhibition (on view until 31 August 2025). From there, the reader moves “upstream” through a sequence of images and texts, arriving eventually as far back as “Los Negros” (The Blacks), a work from 2011. This reversal is not simply archival — it has a conceptual intent, pushing against the suggestion of linear development in favour of a retrospective counter-current that percolates later works through the experiences that came before.

In our conversation with Jorge included in the publication, he reflects on his reluctance to organise his work into themes — a resistance that, in his words, stems from “moving away from the origin”. For him, while a theme might spring from the beginning of a work’s conception, it should not, and will not, remain intact at its end.

Since beginning the intertwined processes of exhibition-making and book-making with Jorge, this conceptual play between the river and the ria has served as an interpretive tool — neither wholly explanatory nor entirely instinctive. Rivers and rias somehow express the subtly distinct forms of agency and transformation that can be found throughout Jorge’s work and all its possibilities. This could be a combination of action and being acted upon, a difference between design and accident, an alloy of shaping and being shaped, or a place where sweet, brackish, and salty water might meet.

A river evokes directionality as it carves a paths, carries matter, and structures through movement. A ria, by contrast, is a site of submersion — a fluvial valley made marine through inundation. Contours remain, but their “purpose” is altered. The ria does not flow so much as hold, or rise and fall. It is not formative, but residual — shaped by external forces. If the river embodies the generative movement of ideas — from initial trickle to a complex delta of meaning — the ria offers a model where the work is no longer about development per se, but about what remains once the current has stopped.

Accordingly, neither the exhibition nor the book looks backward in a conventional sense. Both are formed by a need to move and yet pause — to arrive at a form of display on pages, a moment of presentation in galleries. Yet both allow for the recognition that any form, whether exhibition or publication, is provisional — inevitably to be submerged again by future processes. What appears as accumulation also carries the potential for further inundation, erosion, reinterpretation.