Interstici
A Dialogue with Joan Canyelles
OFF CAN 2025 | Air Raid Shelter, Santa Eulària des Riu //
June 23, 2025
From May 30 to June 29, 2025, Mallorca-based artist Joan Canyelles activates the subterranean space of Santa Eulària’s air raid shelter with Interstici, a site-specific intervention presented within the OFF CAN program. The installation unfolds as a silent spatial syntax, where rhythm and proportion override meaning. Joan, whose work moves between painting, installation, and spatial design, explores abstraction through systems of form, rhythm, and silence. Here, form and support merge into one presence—displacing the symbolic in favor of the sensory.
On the occasion of this ephemeral, site-bound gesture, FVTVRIST enters the interstice with the artist to speak about his practice, systems, absence, and the transformation of perception through geometry.
Interview by Anna Somova//
Installation view, Joan Canyelles, Interstici, 2025.
Photo: Maria Santos / CAN OFF
Installation view, Joan Canyelles, Interstici, 2025.
Photo: Laureline Lavergne / CAN OFF
Interstici doesn’t represent the past, but allows it in—through silence, through pause, through emptiness.
Your practice moves between sculpture, installation, design, and architecture. But beyond disciplines, how would you describe the essence of your artistic language?
My artistic language begins with intuition but seeks to take shape through precise visual systems. I’m interested in creating structures that propose a form of non-verbal communication, where gestures, rhythms, or even the silences of space act as language.
I come from a background in graphic design, so I’m always attentive to how the visual is constructed to be read. But in my artistic work, rather than aiming for clarity, I’m drawn to generating questions, frictions, zones of ambiguity that invite a slower, more attentive gaze.
INTERSTICI
CAN IBIZA 2025
You describe Interstici as a 'cartography without territory.' Could you explain that idea?
The idea comes from thinking of space not as something to be represented, but as something to be contemplated. Interstici proposes a reading without a preexisting map—an experience that forces us to reconfigure our sense of orientation. There is no concrete territory, but rather a network of possible relationships between lines, lights, weights, and voids. It’s a cartography because it organizes, but it doesn’t represent a fixed place: it’s more of an invitation to situate oneself.
What kind of bodily and spatial perception are you seeking to activate in those who enter the work?
I aim to activate a precise, attentive perception. The visitor cannot simply walk through the work—they must adapt, slow their pace, reconsider their own scale. There’s a kind of visual listening that emerges when the path is not prescribed, but suggested. Interstici doesn’t impose a route; it hints at one, and that uncertainty transforms the experience of space.
Geometric language is fundamental in this work: right angles, suspended lines, repetitions. What emotional or philosophical weight does that structure hold for you?
Although it may seem cold, for me, geometric language carries a deeply human charge. Geometry is an attempt to bring order to the world, but it also reveals our limitations. I'm interested in that clash between the rationality of the system and the emotionality of the experience—how a perfectly measured structure can provoke a sense of vertigo, of introspection, or even of calm.
Joan Canyelles / Portrait.
Courtesy of the artist
Is Interstici a language of its own? A space that speaks without words?
Yes, I believe it’s a form of spatial writing. Instead of words, there are lines; instead of sentences, there are tensions and voids. It’s a silent language, but no less eloquent for that. I’m very interested in how certain traces or compositions can evoke ideas, memories, or states without needing to state anything literally.
You’ve installed this work in the Refugio Antiaéreo de Santa Eulària. How does the installation dialogue with that subterranean past?
The shelter carries a dense, almost mineral memory. I didn’t want to compete with that historical weight, but rather to resonate with it. Interstici doesn’t act as an invasive gesture, but as a suspended trace in time—one that highlights the tension between protection and confinement, between marking and erasure. It’s an ephemeral drawing within a space of survival.
How do you think about the relationship between memory and presence in a space like this? And what place does Interstici occupy within that tension?
I think memory is not something we recall, but something we activate. Interstici doesn’t represent the past, but allows it in—through silence, through pause, through emptiness. The work inhabits the present with a fragility that creates space for the past and the viewer’s body to meet without hierarchy.
Your work navigates the threshold between intuition and structure. How do these forces coexist in your process—and what role does chance play within the discipline of geometry?
There’s a constant tension between the two. My background in design leads me to build through precision, but I often begin with a spontaneous gesture that already contains an internal logic. I’m interested in the moment when an apparently rigorous structure hides an imperfect or unexpected origin. Chance enters as a minimal deviation—as an interruption that reveals the fragility of the system.
Installation view, Joan Canyelles, Interstici, 2025.
Photo: Laureline Lavergne / CAN OFF
Emptiness is not absence—it is relationship. I'm interested in the space that exists between two lines, between two structures, between two gestures. That’s where something happens. Emptiness generates rhythm, pause, possibility. It’s where the viewer’s attention is activated.
In that sense, I work with emptiness the way one constructs a sentence with silences.
//
What does it mean for you to be part of the OFF program at CAN Ibiza with this work? How does the context of the fair dialogue with your proposal? And what are your expectations for this edition of CAN?
Being part of the OFF program allows me to engage in a dialogue that’s less conditioned by the logic of the market and more attuned to space—to the specificity of place. Interstici is not a transportable work; it exists only in relation to the context in which it’s installed. In that sense, participating in CAN from outside the main spotlight makes sense to me, because it allows me to work with a different scale of time and attention.
As for expectations, my hope is that CAN 2025 continues to consolidate a scene that is not only commercial, but also critical and sensitive to the local context. That it serves as a meeting point between the insular and the global. Also I noticed that the fair has generated greater visibility and a flow of audiences and agents that were not as present before. But the challenge is ensuring that this momentum doesn’t remain on the surface—that it translates into a denser network of collaboration between artists, spaces, and local communities.
Installation view, Joan Canyelles, Interstici, 2025. Photo: Laureline Lavergne / CAN OFF
The OFF program aims to give visibility to Balearic art and to connect Ibiza and Formentera through artistic creation. Do you feel your work emerges from that insular identity, or does it exist beyond any geography?
I don’t think my practice is defined by a geographic identity, but it is deeply shaped by the insular condition. Being surrounded by the sea creates a different perception of space, of boundaries, of repetition. It’s not so much an explicit cultural belonging, but rather a way of inhabiting the world that inevitably filters into my work.
You’re part of a generation that is redefining spatial and minimalist language from the islands. How do you see this moment for contemporary Balearic art?
There is a generation exploring new forms of presence through minimal means—proposing spatial languages that don’t aim to impose themselves, but to activate the site. I see this as a fertile moment, where creation is rooted in attentiveness, structure, and listening, in contrast to the overstimulation of the contemporary environment.
What other voids—conceptual, architectural, or emotional—do you feel are still left for you to explore?
I feel I still have much to explore in terms of installations that invite meditation—not as spaces of closure, but as open devices that generate questions. I'm interested in creating pieces that activate a pause, but don’t offer complete reassurance—works that compel us to remain in uncertainty, in the unfinished, in possibility.
FIN