The landscape is not a backdrop. It is not a passive scene nor an ornament of the living. It is a porous body, an architecture in constant reconfiguration where matter, time, and experience intertwine. There is no landscape without affection. It is not merely a horizon to be looked at, but a historical, cultural, and sensorial construction that shapes our way to inhabit and imagine the world.

We travel to see it, turn it into a screensaver, collect it in memory and in art. But we also fear it: within it our vulnerability is revealed, the crises and wounds of the system we inhabit are materialized.

Drifts of Landscapes takes as its starting point the exercise proposed by Guy Debord: a journey without fixed trajectories, where viewers can lose themselves and, in that wandering, re-signify their relationship with their surroundings. From the fragility of the watercolor strokes to the solidity of glass, from the affective memory of ceramic objects to the silence turned into sculpture, the artists gathered here open a conversation about how nature has a profoundly human construction.

Human beings are not external to the landscape: we inhabit it, dream it, contaminate it, transform it. And in that gesture, we also reveal ourselves. The landscape is not neutral. It is charged with history, politics, and emotion. It is a surface of tensions where trauma, gaze, and collective memory are inscribed. It is not out there: it runs through us. More than a frame that possesses, it is a fabric of which we are a part.

From this premise, the exhibition presents a structure that shifts, decomposes, and reconfigures itself through the voices of four Latin American artists based in Mexico City — Sofía Ortiz, María Enríquez, Karen Rodríguez, and Valentina Guerrero — who expand the concept of landscape through different languages: painting, ceramics, stained glass, and drawing. All of them understand landscape not as a distant stage, but as a living organism where the intimate, the domestic, the political, and the natural converge. In their works emerge fragments, atmospheres, omens, silences, memories, and remains; the landscape becomes a shattered mirror where our ways of naming and inhabiting the world are reflected.

Sofía Ortiz builds dreamlike landscapes through watercolor, yet her gesture is not escapist: she deconstructs the forms we once believed natural. Molecular models, botanical compositions, cosmic and intimate elements dissolve and recombine into impossible scenarios that question the rigidity of what we call “natural.” Her watercolors function as laboratories: spaces to think about how we have domesticated — and aestheticized — nature and continue to project onto it the search for other possible orders.

María Enríquez presents hyperrealistic ceramic sculptures of fruits that evoke the stories of those who work the land. In her work, a fruit ceases to be a mere food item and becomes a link: to family, to the earth, to an economy that has dispossessed those who cultivate it. These pieces, as precise as they are poetic, reflect on the fragility of the global system through its smallest element. Her landscape is domestic and affective, but also political: a topography of dispossession and the silent resistance of those who still sustain the roots.

Karen Rodríguez imagines a landscape built from language and its voids. Her ceramic sculptures emerge from the gaps between letters, from the cracks of handwriting and the gesture of writing. Her significance stems from her and her family’s relationship with language, where silence is not absence but possibility. In these pieces derived from graphic practice, language acquires volume and contour, inviting us to read — or to listen to — what hides between words, as if each form were a poem yet to be written.

Valentina Guerrero looks to the sky and finds in it a shifting form of threat. Her stained-glass works evoke skies polluted by plastic and oil, echoes of the water cycle disrupted by the very system that sustains it. Her optical devices invite collective observation of the sky and contemplation of the possibility of purification. In dialogue with a moment that proposes contemplation, her work reminds us that the landscape is built not only from what is visible but also from what is sensed: a horizon that is no longer a promise, but that might still be cleansed.

This exhibition invites us to abandon the linear and functional gaze we often impose on the landscape — as resource, postcard, or decorative background — and to enter it through intuition, detour, and discovery. Each work becomes a station that interrupts habit and opens a territory of contemplation.

Drifts of Landscapes does not seek definitive answers, but rather to intensify our relationship with what surrounds us: to recognize that the landscape, more than an object to be observed, is a field of experiences that is inhabited, endured, and transformed. Drifts of the Landscape proposes that even though everything may seem to point toward an end — devastation, exhaustion, collapse — that end might also be a beginning. The landscape, as these artists show us, holds within its folds both the memory of tragedy and the promise of what might yet heal.

— Luis Manuel Perea