Vortex unfolded from the Emerging Latam program, which in recent years had given visibility to emerging voices from Latin America at Swab. After five editions, this section had evolved from being a platform for showcasing local scenes into a transversal and curatorial space, oriented toward a broader and more porous dialogue between contexts.

In this new stage, the project expanded its scope toward an exchange between young projects from Barcelona and Latin America, with the intention of building bridges between two territories whose cultural landscapes had mutually shaped one another, sharing a back-and-forth of resonances, influences, and reinventions. Co-curated by Santiago Gasquet, who had been responsible for the program over the previous five editions, and Lena Solà Nogué, a Barcelona-based curator living in Mexico who joined that year, Vortex proposed a model of shared occupation: six spaces of the fair were cohabited by twelve young galleries, six from each region.

This format generated a space of friction, affinity, and negotiation, where both resonances and structural differences between the two scenes were explored, around resources, sustainability, and institutional frameworks, which, far from marking distance, activated a field of interdependence. The projects gathered presented works that interrogated displacement, colonial memories, gender disputes, and also affective forms of collective construction, affirming fragility as resistance.

In this way, Vortex was configured as a meeting point for artists whose interests and trajectories circulated between here and Latin America, facilitating the creation of cultural networks to share resources, issues, and strategies. The section invited reflection on the complexity and movement of artistic scenes as experiences of transit, where they were recognized, contested, and reinvented in common.

Beyond the logic of the market and in a present marked by the speed and uniformity of narratives, Vortex emphasized cohabitation as a curatorial gesture and as a tool to explore the construction of cultural ties between bodies, territories, and imaginaries, highlighting critique and contextual thinking as key elements to understand, discuss, and project emerging practices.