S.M.A.K. GHENT REVISITS GARCÍA AND NAVARRO’S PROPOSAL FOR THE 2022 VENICE BIENNALE

The Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst (S.M.A.K.) in Ghent presents Unearthed Conversation, an exhibition that revisits the project García and Navarro developed for the Chilean Pavilion at the 2022 Venice Biennale, now shown for the first time in an exhibition context. As such, the body of work created for the occasion can be considered, to some extent, previously unseen.

For this project, the artists draw on two pre-existing audiovisual works: the documentary Aquí Vivieron (1964) by filmmakers Pedro Chaskel and Héctor Ríos, and images captured on Mars by NASA’s Perseverance rover, publicly available since 2021. With these references in mind, García and Navarro establish a dialogue between the Atacama Desert and the red planet, weaving together their shared features while evoking both past and present.

At the core of the exhibition lies the Atacama Desert, which acts as its structural axis. Its unique geological and geographical characteristics position it as a site of immense symbolic weight, where multiple timelines and events converge. Archaeological layers recalling past civilizations coexist with the more recent memory of the dictatorship, while its present role as the location of some of the world’s most important telescopes points toward the future.

Through video, installation, drawing, and sound, the artists approach landscape as a living archive. From this perspective, they reflect on how physical territories retain memory and traces of human activity. In this re-reading, the desert’s past becomes intertwined with space exploration, generating a conversation between the terrestrial and the cosmic.

By combining simple archaeological tools with advanced technologies such as those used by NASA, Francisca García and Mario Navarro raise questions about how what we do not see or perceive shapes our understanding of the world around us, prompting reflections on memory and the human condition.

Francisca García and Mario Navarro. Unearthed Conversation is on view until 13 September 2026 at the Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst (S.M.A.K.), Jan Hoetplein 1, Ghent (Belgium).