The exhibition Intoxicated waters by artist Regina de Miguel invites us to imagine an extraplanetary museum that was unsuccessfully terraformed centuries ago—a memorial to a failed space utopia. The Tornus Museum is set in a future where museums—with their discourses meant to give meaning to progress and as centers for educating the colonizing gaze of a world governed by a select few—have completely lost their meaning. What remains is an archive aware of its incompleteness, its contamination, and its complicity with the slow violence that permeates the universe.
In the first part, the Telluric Archive of Tornus is conceived as an artificial swamp where life, waste, data, and matter intermingle in the form of drawings and sculptures from various fictional museums or archives, along with geological elements to be analyzed. The second part consists of the newly produced audiovisual essay Poisoned waters, unseen kites, a gathering of suicides. It tells the story of a scientist trapped in a pandemic, leading us into an emotional exploration of anxiety, ecological guilt, data overload, and the difficulty of imagining a future. In this essay, various sites in Puerto Rico—such as the Arecibo Observatory, coral farms, and marshes—become examples of a form of governance that gradually renders certain territories and bodies unlivable through the cumulative effect of military, economic, and scientific decisions imposed upon them.
The Galactic Museum project continues the artist’s ongoing exploration of our extractivist ambition—not only terrestrial but cosmic—and its possible future scenarios. It is constructed as an interior from which to view the reflection of our ways of life. In Tornus, political imagination shifts from a progressive flight to the far more pertinent question of how to inhabit a damaged system.
