La Maravilla | Alexa Horochowski + Christina Schmid

Join us for a screening of Alexa Horochowski’s two-channel video piece La Maravilla (35mins) followed by a conversation with the artist and writer Christina Schmid.

Raised in the city of Comodoro Rivadavia in Patagonia, Argentina, Alexa Horochowski draws copiously from the natural world, using substances like Antarctic kelp, obsidian, adobe and bark in the construction of sculptures that emphasize human impermanence within ecologically deep time. By exploring the intersection of the human and natural worlds, Horochowski’s interdisciplinary practice explores how political upheaval and man-made climate change reshape the temporal construction of memory and meaning.

Shot during the 2019-2020 uprisings in Chile, known as the ‘Estallido Social’ (social outburst), La Maravilla follows stray dogs amid protestors carrying Chilean and indigenous Mapuche flags, roaming through the Port of San Antonio and on the beaches. The subject was inspired by the rise of ‘Negro Matapacos’, a stray dog long celebrated for his allyship in clashes with the police who became a contemporary Chilean folk hero and has been widely adopted as a symbol in broader global anti-colonial movements. The stray dog’s gritty perseverance in the face of systemic neglect is familiar to those impacted by economic models that engender material, political, and social inequality.

The perspective of La Maravilla also reflects ideas surrounding ‘more-than-human’ geographies and the concept of the Chthulucene. Emphasizing the entangled relations between humans and nonhuman others, our hierarchical position is rejected in favor of co-dwelling within ongoing multispecies futures. La Maravilla foregrounds the reality of our connected ecologies and the repercussions of economies of extraction. For Horochowski, La Maravilla “speculates on a post-human, life-sustaining ecology of repair wherein our more-than-human friends teach us how to tread lightly on this biosphere we call Earth.”

Christina Schmid is a writer who thinks with art and experiments with prose. She is interested in the materiality of text, haptic criticism, and the ways art generates ideas. Her essays and reviews have been published online and in print, in anthologies, journals, zines, artist books, and exhibition catalogs. Schmid is Assistant Professor in the University of Minnesota’s Department of Art and teaches contemporary art, critical practice, process, and theory.