MIART

In the project “Celestial Mirrors”, nature is neither subject nor theme, but coauthor. Both artists develop practices in which natural processes become instruments of creation, allowing light, time, and matter to act as autonomous agents of transformation. On one side, Almudena Romero with Fossils of Our Time reactivates the nineteenth-century technique of the anthotype, transforming it into a postindustrial photography where the sun and plants imprint their own memory onto paper through photosynthesis. It is sunlight that builds the image, in a process that embraces duration, unpredictability, and collaboration with the elements. The result is not a photograph in the traditional sense, but a fossil of light: sedimented time, a fragment of the present impressed into vegetal matter. On the other side, Mercedes Lachmann with Acasos Matriarcais investigates the relationship between the moon, plants, and the feminine, exploring the cyclicality of time and the silent, dark processes of transformation. Her sculptures, ampoules, and circular forms contain mother tinctures prepared during the waning moon, in a ritual that follows the lunar and vegetal rhythm. Each work is a microcosm where the forces of earth and sky condense into form. In their encounter, the sun and the moon become complementary poles of the same inquiry: creation as a shared act between the human and the natural. Romero works in full exposure to light; Lachmann in its withdrawal and absence. Both conceive artistic practice as an ecological and performative process, in which matter is not molded but accompanied in its becoming. Their dialogue moves between photosynthesis and fermentation, day and night, visibility and darkness, proposing a radical vision in which art becomes an ecosystem. No longer a representation of nature, but a coexistence with it — a shared gesture between the light of the sun and that reflected by the moon, between the gesture of the artist and that of the world.