Fermín Jiménez Landa - “Frost and Breath”

Winning project of COP 3 - Open Call for Projects 2026

The works gathered in “Escarcha y vaho” work on and with water as a material, but also as a system of circulation, measurement, belief, and conflict. The project does not introduce large volumes of water, but activates its substitutes, displacements, and fictions: transported, evaporated, condensed, imagined, or simply named water.

Against the monumental scale of water cycles — oceans, migrations, and infrastructures — the pieces operate from the minimum. Almost ridiculous gestures, fragile actions, and useless displacements. These gestures connect with systems of great complexity: global trade, tourism, climate change, or border policies. The Aljub functions as a resonance chamber. It does not show the resource, but we have its absence, its circulation, or its fetishization.

The exhibition is constructed as a choreography of water states: solid (transported ice, fossils, or shell cement), liquid (displaced water or sea at body temperature), and vapor (condensation of the same space).

The works force the physical states of matter: ice that travels more than many bodies, a lake reduced to recip