Only one thing was strange: to go on thinking as usual. Melanie Smith

This exhibition brings together the latest productions by Mexican-British artist Melanie Smith: Estudios para ajolote (2025) and Tixinda (2025).

Both projects revolve around two endangered animals: on the one hand, the Ambystoma mexicanum, also known as the Mexican Axolotl, an amphibian endemic to the Valley of Mexico, of which between 500 and 1,000 individuals remain in their natural habitat; and on the other, the Plicopurpura pansa, or purple snail, an animal that has historically dyed fabrics purple in different geographical areas and today only inhabits, in danger, the coasts of Oaxaca in Mexico.

Under the question of gaze and image, the artist searches in different media such as painting, drawing, video, and sculpture ways to approach these forms of life without generating deterministic representations. These are journeys through different scales of vision and perspectives that allow the artist to play with representations in order to propose an approach that connects the audience with the animal’s own agency, from its corporeality, its plasticity, its color, in a phrase, from its way of existing.

With these works, Smith articulates a series of questions about the relationship between culture and nature, questioning the idea of separation and overcoming an ontological hierarchy of living beings, evoking a poetics that invites another way of looking, perhaps more empathetic, more curious, which seeks, within the limits of art itself, to learn from the other beings with whom we live. A learning process where the only strange thing is to think as before.