La boca llena de trigo de Mayte Gómez Molina

La boca llena de trigo is the debut novel by poet Mayte Gómez Molina, who, with her vivid, ironic, and sharp prose, makes her narrative debut with a profoundly intimate book in which the vertigo of being seen and the fear of not measuring up become a radical commitment to care—for oneself and others—as a form of resistance. A novel in which art is not a theme, but a wound: that which hurts, that which saves, that which unites us.

La boca llena de trigo is the story of a child prodigy, now a woman trapped on a blank canvas. A story about chance, about the tension between freedom and obedience, about the desire to be honest with who one is and with what one carries with them. A reflection on self-imposed demands, pretence, and the emotional and economic precarity faced by those trying to make their way in a world still anchored to the fiction of meritocracy.

A call from Maria Manzoni, the country’s most important gallery owner and a major figure in private contemporary art collecting, triggers a profound creative and existential crisis. Anna then faces not only market pressure, but also the memory of a childhood marked by rejection and guilt, a foundational friendship that is crumbling, and the suspicion that she may have betrayed something important along the way.

Presented by: Raquel Victoria, curator

Mayte Gómez Molina is a writer, researcher, and new media artist who uses writing as the backbone of a multifaceted practice. She works with poetry and fiction in a traditional sense, creating “book” objects, but also explores the expansion of literature into digital formats through film, 3D, and virtual reality. A Fulbright scholar from 2019 to 2021, she earned a Master’s degree in Film, Video, New Media, and Animation from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In 2021, she held her first solo exhibition at the University of Granada, Me veo la nuca, which led to her first poetry collection: Mi piel virtual, cansada. After winning several literary competitions, she was awarded the 2023 Miguel Hernández National Young Poetry Prize for her work Los trabajos sin Hércules. In 2024, she published the poetry collection Circuito cerrado de vigilancia. She is currently part of the MAKE/SENSE doctoral program at the Basel Academy of Art and Design, where she also teaches at the Institute of Art, Gender and Nature.