Vortex unfolds from the Emerging Latam program, which in recent years has made visible emerging voices from Latin America at Swab. After five editions, this section has evolved from being a visibility platform for local scenes to becoming a transversal and curatorial space, oriented towards a broader and more porous dialogue between contexts.

In this new stage, the project expands its scope towards an exchange between young projects from Barcelona and Latin America, with the intention of building bridges between two territories whose cultural landscapes have mutually shaped each other, sharing a back-and-forth of resonances, influences, and reinventions. Co-curated by Santiago Gasquet, responsible for the program during the last five editions, and Lena Solà Nogué, a Barcelona-based curator residing in Mexico who joins this year, Vortex proposes a model of shared occupation: six spaces of the fair will be cohabited by twelve young galleries, six from each region.

This format generates a space of friction, affinity, and negotiation, where both the resonances and the structural differences between the two scenes are explored, around resources, sustainability, or institutionality, which, far from marking distance, activate a field of interdependence. The gathered projects unfold works that interrogate displacements, colonial memories, gender disputes, and also affective forms of joint construction, affirming fragility as resistance.

In this way, Vortex is configured as a meeting point for artists whose interests and trajectories circulate between here and Latin America, facilitating the creation of cultural networks to share resources, problems, and strategies. The section invites us to think of the complexity and movement of artistic scenes as experiences of transit, where they are recognized, disputed, and reinvented in common.

Beyond the logic of the market and in a present marked by speed and the uniformity of narratives, Vortex emphasizes cohabitation as a curatorial gesture and as a tool to inquire into the construction of cultural bonds between bodies, territories, and imaginaries, highlighting critique and contextual thought as keys to understanding, discussing, and projecting emerging practices.