During her residency in Lagos, Fabiana Mapel reconnected with her studio as a space for artistic production. After a long journey in which she captured images (now present in her Open Studio), she returned to Mexico City with new questions about her artistic practice and, in particular, with a desire to more deeply articulate the threads of her research.

Thus, during the first month, we set ourselves the task of reviewing her notebooks and the bodies of work she has produced over the past four years. In them, we found a recurring attention to gesture and to the moments of deep focus that Fabiana cultivates and captures when she is surrounded by trees, plants, and animals in "natural" environments—less urbanized places that she enjoys visiting and returns to with a cyclical need, whether it be Bacalar, where her family lives, or the desert of La Laguna, where she was born and raised until adolescence. In these places—and in those she visits on her travels—she listens, observes, and captures in photography and video whatever fascinates her attention: the murmur of the jungle, the movement of a leaf suspended on a spiderweb thread, the reflections of water, the rhythm of the sea, a dying animal, or a house gate shaped like a sunset. These images and sounds become her archives, which in turn fuel her second interest: nostalgia and memory.

In the second month of her residency, she transformed these archives into paintings, video projections, photographs, and objects—an installation that we can now appreciate, in which, through gestures of irony and juxtaposition, she invites us to reflect on the distant awareness of a global longing for nature as an idyllic space. Confronted with the petrosexoracial horizon of hyper-consumerist society, Fabiana’s pieces raise questions through a triad of concepts: ‘irony,’ ‘melancholy,’ and ‘nature.’

Might we strengthen our awareness if we inhabit the collapse of grand narratives? Could we uncover an alternative somewhere between nostalgia and ironic defiance?

By combining painting and installation, Fabiana gives us the opportunity to witness, among other images, jungle lianas, a sun within a lamp, a sick horse, and the poetic gesture of sending (us) a postcard—acknowledging the extravagant, contradictory, and absurd belief system we have created.

olgaMargarita dávila
Chief curator