The exhibition “Nerve Bushes Like Coral Forests” opens with the eponymous series of works on paper, which artist Regina de Miguel has been developing since the beginning of 2020. The meditative watercolors mimic old-fashioned biological illustrations of curious species. They depict elements that are often the protagonists of the artist’s films—birds, millipedes, kelp, fragments of ancient amulets—in assemblages that levitate over washes of soft color. A second selection of watercolors, Exvote, coral reefs, 2021, reads more like terrain maps, spelled out in sketches of organisms, runes, and illegible codes. Together, these bodies of work set the stage for a new film created in collaboration with musician Lucrecia Dalt. Intoxicated waters, comets never again to be seen and a meeting of suicides, 2021, the forty-five-minute video, centers on a science-fiction narrative from the perspective of an interplanetary traveler in the distant future.

Within the film, de Miguel employs autoethnography and climate fiction as tools to speculate on the future, the ancient past, and the cyclical nature of civilization. As the artist’s stand-in, the narrator is a cosmic nomad trapped on a swampy planet by an enigmatic epidemic. She soon makes the acquaintance of a mystic named Dóvida, who calls on unheard voices—those of stones and of the dead—to form a single powerful choir. Operating within the realm of fiction, the exhibition offers a critical portrait of our anxious times and the urgent need to break the centuries-long silence that surrounds us.

— Àngels Miralda