Out of Season Juliana Galbetti

Christmas is generally associated with coziness, family, and affective memory. However, the new exhibition by visual artist Juliana Galbetti, curated by Catalina Bergues, proposes an unprecedented and anthropological perspective on the holiday. Titled Out of Season, the show runs from December 13, 2025, to January 31, 2026, at OMA Galeria and takes as its starting point a visit to Celebra Show — one of the largest wholesale trade fairs of the Christmas industry in Latin America.

From this encounter, Galbetti traces the Christmas ritual at its moment of industrial and commercial conception, revealing the backstage where trees, lights, and ornaments are defined as merchandise months before they occupy homes and streets. The exhibition follows the moment when manufacturers, importers, suppliers, and designers determine the trends, materials, and visual languages that will shape the holiday’s aesthetic universe.

The exhibition — an investigative project that addresses the temporal gap between the object and the rite — was selected and made possible through the 6th OMA Curatorial Call. The research that originated the project began with conceptual exchanges between the artist and the curator in early 2025, culminating in the joint writing of the proposal submitted to the call.

The curator notes that “before becoming a ritual, Christmas is a project. It is a disputed trend, an architected desire, aesthetic consumption, a constructed atmosphere. It is matter awaiting to become a symbol.” “My interest shifted to this liminal zone, the backstage where it is conceived, where the magic is still a prototype,” explains Galbetti, whose research transforms the logistical universe of the holiday into poetic material.

Christmas Before It Exists
 

Out of Season investigates how Christmas is constructed as a contemporary liturgy, with affections articulated through merchandise, design, and controlled atmospheres. The artist observes how this structure is manufactured in a technical time that operates outside the symbolic calendar — what she calls “out of season.”

The exhibition follows the moment when artificial trees, lights, wrapping papers, and chromatic patterns are still in a state of preparation, before acquiring the emotional dimension of the celebration.

The show brings together works that explore three central axes in the construction of Christmas, belonging to the Christmas Spirit series, presenting them as systems of visual organization in a complex topography where the elements exist as potentiality. These axes include the lights (LED systems and structures that highlight control over luminous intensity and the choreographed repetition of blinking); the signs (ornaments, branches, and trees that reveal the visual grammar of Christmas symbols and how they are designed and combined); and the packaging (wrapping papers and graphic patterns that expose the logic of anticipating desire, emphasizing their role as mediators of affection).

At the center of the room, a vertical sculpture made from spools of LED lights articulates value and luminosity by arranging them from the cheapest to the most luxurious. On the floor, sheets of wrapping paper are stacked to form a cube; the sheets, printed with photographs of every Christmas tree exhibited at Celebra Show, can be taken by visitors, reinserting these images into the same circulation system that produced them.

These elements, often associated with the domestic imaginary, emerge here as systems for organizing desire that will shape consumption, proposing an expanded reading of this ritual.

The Ambiguity Between Consumption and Affection
 

The phrase MINIMUM ORDER, presented in light, functions as a point of inflection. Installed on the gallery façade, the work reinforces its direct dialogue with the commercial sphere and with the street. The term, typical of wholesale (B2B) negotiations, gains a double resonance here, simultaneously echoing the commercial universe and the childlike gesture of asking Santa Claus.

Juliana’s method, which breaks down Christmas elements into their minimal units, dialogues with conceptual procedures of historical avant-gardes while provoking reflection on the ambiguity between consumption, desire, fetish, and promise that structures the holiday. Language, like objects, appears as malleable matter that crosses multiple fields — from the market to the imaginary, from logistics to fantasy. By installing this “before” in the exhibition space, the show opens a window onto the delicate path between industrial prototype and affective memory.