What leaves, speaks

Gris García and Carolina Páez Vélez

Vernissage: 05.06.2026, 19 – 22h
Listening Session & Finissage: 19.06.2026, 19h (listening session starts)

Something is removed, and cannot return. Gris García and Carolina Páez Vélez present site-specific iterations of their works on ecological memory, grief and agency. Painting, stone and fiber art trace the effects of mining on families of mountains around Monterrey, Mexico and the “Baju Cauca” region of the Nechi river in Colombia. Land is seen as family, not territory or resource. And yet, this family is met at moments of violent transformation into resource.

Something is removed, and disappears. This would even so be a violent thing in the nonconsensuality of grief, but it is also an explicit and visceral violence against the lands and people whose lives become ‘collateral damage’ in various ways. It is an explicit violence of neocolonial capitalism, whose present and unstable future increases the un-presence of beloved systems, places and people.

There is a sharpness and a softness to the vulnerability and endurance put into this exhibition. There is an element of protecting what is gone, protecting its memory- or maybe closer, its reality. This is not just about ‘informing’ visitors, or trying to create awareness. This is about living with living without.

But the artists (and lands) are not without agency. García and Páez Vélez live and work with the new connections, the questions, the participation that these disappearances bring. These disappearances respond, return, affect the relationship. The work is not a grief projected in static. It is an active relationship with mutation and disappearance and reality, as it is.

Something is removed. It remembers itself.

The full program includes the exhibition of Gris García and Carolina Páez Vélez, a workshop on the properties and familial relations of rocks by daniela brill estrada, and a listening session curated by material inmaterial in the framework of Playlist Curada.

Vernissage
June 5, 19-22h

Workshop (free to attend, registration per email at george.s@mzbaltazarslaboratory.org)
June 13, 13-15h

Listening Session & Finissage
June 19, 19-22h

Opening hours 16-19h
June 6
June 11, 12, 13
June 18, 19
or by appointment

Exhibiting Artists: Gris García and Carolina Páez Vélez
Program Artists: daniela brill estrada, material inmaterial
Curation: Sarah Wilhelmy
Lighting & Exhibition Design: Rajarshi Sarkar
Title Poster: Evamaria Müller
This exhibition is supported by BMWKMS and MA7