L A V A
curated by: Mayté Valencia and Mario Wandu
artists: Guadalupe Aldrete, Daniel H. Pineda, Teresa Margolles, Cuaco Navarro, Blu Pedra, and Mario Wandu
Opening: 24. June 2026, 19:00
exhibition open until: 11. July 2026
Through ritualistic, performative, and multimedia practices, L A V A explores body, memory, and materiality—activating ancestral knowledge and collective forms of care, bringing together artists from the Global South and Europe
a project by Ancestral Synonyms & Save The Artist & eindorf
Funded by the Austrian „MA 7 Kulturabteilung” for visual arts and the “Bundesministerium für Wohnen, Kunst, Kultur, Medien und Sport”
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L A V A: The seed sprouts. The textile retains the sweat of a body. The image cracks and, like a spectre, an ancestral deity appears; a home that never existed, an absent corpse. When lava touches water, obsidian emerges. Matter transforms, boils, erodes: it is present in an analogue film, a series of paintings interwoven with dreams, memories and photographic archives, an artificial garden evoking calm and refuge in contrast to power relations and technologies of exclusion. In the darkness, the viewer’s spectator is also a fissure through which light enters and exits.
As a laboratory, residency and exhibition, LAVA unfolds through performative installations, fictionalised archives and multimedia works that invite us to explore ways of inhabiting memory as an accumulation of layers, erasures and projections, where identity always appears mediated by other bodies, other landscapes and other space-time dimensions. What emerges is not the result of a straight path, but the trace of multiple attempts in which the works of Guadalupe Aldrete, Daniel H. Pineda, Teresa Margolles, Cuaco Navarro, Blu Pedra and Mario Wandu —artists from Mexico, Chile, Spain and Austria— maintain an active relationship with that which produces them: genealogies and displacements of subsistence.
The exhibition moves between materials that evoke memories, almost without intending to. As if memory were not contained within narratives but clung to surfaces. As if it dwelled in the folds of matter, what remains after use, wear and tear, and oblivion. The works thus appear as vulnerable organisms traversed by other lives and other times. Here, the ancestral is presented not as an origin or monument, but as a diffuse presence that reappears where least expected: in the dampness of clay, the repetition of movement or the persistence of an image that never fully reveals itself.
What matters is not the fidelity of memory, but its capacity to transform and forge new connections. LAVA is where materials perform. It is a space where making a mistake ceases to be an interruption and becomes a form of listening. It is a place where uncertainty does not signal a lack of direction, but rather the possibility of continuing to explore.
Like an underground current, something continues to move beneath the surface. Something is smouldering slowly. Something is about to change shape.
text by Mayté Valencia & Mario Wandu
PICTURES:
1 + 8. Garden of One’s Own (2026)
Cuaco Navarro
Multimedia installation, chia seeds, clay
2. La Réplica
Teresa Margolles
Super-8-Video, 2’32’’
3 + 7. Serpiente (2026)
Guadalupe Aldrete
Glazed ceramic
4. La especie en duda (2025)
Blu Pedra
Multimedia installation
5. Untitled (2026)
Mario Wandu
Digital print, Aleppo pine, ocoxal and copper
6. Bigotes (2026)
Daniel H. Pineda
Painting (acrylic and pastel) and photographs from the family archive
– Foto – documentation by Cuaco Navarro –
