Enraizada | Alessandra Sequeira

Enraizada – Donde el Miedo se Desvanece: Alessandra Sequeira Exhibition at the Museo Rafael Ángel Calderón Guardia

Alessandra Sequeira Garza’s new exhibition at San José’s Museo Dr. Rafael Ángel Calderón Guardia presents a significant new body of work — paintings, textile sculpture and large-scale installation that maps personal trauma, therapy and recovery through thread and ink.

By Belinda Seppings, MÍRAME Fine Art

The Alessandra Sequeira exhibition now on view at San José’s Museo Dr. Rafael Ángel Calderón Guardia is an ambitious undertaking. Entitled Enraizada – Donde el Miedo se Desvanece (Rooted – Where Fear Dissolves), it includes paintings, textile, sculpture and a monumental installation to document the arc of psychological rupture and repair.

Sequeira, born in San José in 1969 and trained in graphic design at the Universidad de Costa Rica and the Universidad Veritas, has spent more than two decades building an international exhibition record. She has shown in Basel, London and New York, and is a recurrent presence in biennials and museums across Central America.

Her solo exhibition Re-Conexión at the Museo de Arte y Diseño Contemporáneo (MADC) in 2024 consolidated her position as one of the more serious material artists working in Costa Rica today. Her earlier series — Sinapsis (2013) and Interconexiones (2016) — established the formal language she returns to throughout — dense, branching structures inspired by biological and botanical systems.

With Enraizada, that vocabulary takes on explicit autobiographical weight. The works were made during and after her engagement with EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing), a trauma-processing therapy using rhythmic ocular movement to help the nervous system revisit painful memories. As she says in the catalogue, the exhibition is the record of returning to the origin of her life story.

Alessandra Sequeira, EMDR 1

This Alessandra Sequeira exhibition unfolds as a sustained argument about what the body holds and what it eventually releases. The EMDR canvases (numbered I through VIII, all 2025) trace this process work by work. EMDR I, for example, presents a dense implosion of black thread at the centre of a turquoise-ringed circle on raw canvas: trauma as a compressed nucleus, absorbing all available energy.

By EMDR V, the tree form that runs through Sequeira’s practice reappears with more legible structure — roots and canopy now distinguishable, the composition opening where earlier works contracted. EMDR VI floods the canvas in crimson and charcoal — its arterial reds and dark, knotted threads read like cartography of the nervous system at a moment of crisis, and yet the overall composition holds. There is order within the intensity.

Alessandra Sequeira, EMDR V

The diptych Re Conexión (2025, 250 x 260 x 30 cm) is a strong formal statement. Two large canvases, each carrying a field of sweeping black branches, are joined at the centre by a column of black textile that cascades from painted surface to floor — thread becoming umbilical, bridging painted worlds. The gesture is economical and exact.

Alessandra Sequeira, Re Conexión

Curated by Gary Hior Hidalgo-Rodríguez and accompanied by a clinical text from psychologist Verónica Castro Camacho, the exhibition can also be experienced as public health statement. Sequeira is explicit about that intention: to use art as a catalyst for dialogue around mental health, childhood adversity and the conditions that produce emotional disconnection in adult life. The installation Enraizada (2026), the exhibition’s centrepiece, makes this ambition spatial. A structure of woven yarn and bamboo — eight metres wide, five metres deep, four and a half metres high — occupies the museum’s main hall. Smaller woven forms cluster at its base like emergent growths. Overwhelming in scale, it is also surprisingly tender in texture.

As Sequeira says in the exhibition catalogue, this body of work is the record of “the hardest but most self-loving journey” of her life.

Alessandra Sequeira, Redención

Other notable works include Redención (2025) is an embroidered panel in deep red cotton and metallic thread, suspended so that its fibres descend to the floor in long, loose falls. Up close, the surface is densely worked — the stitching tight at the centre, loosening toward the edges before releasing entirely into those hanging threads. The effect is somewhere between wound and bloom, containment and letting go. The Triuno sculptures (2025) — three forms in woven bamboo and coiling on stainless steel armatures, installed outdoors on open ground — suggest something altogether more buoyant: mass that has learned to be still.

The Alessandra Sequeira exhibition Enraizada – Donde el Miedo se Desvanece is on view at the Museo Dr. Rafael Ángel Calderón Guardia, San José, Costa Rica.

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