Here Be Dragons

In her first exhibition in Berlin, Serrano Rivas presents four bodies of works that take their beginning in the natural world, among the life of plants. They soon reveal themselves as the muses of earth history and the carriers of the non-heroic stories of humans and nonhumans. They engage the ongoing inquiries of Serrano Rivas, in which she explores the inherent theatricality of the ways we coexist and produce knowledge. In her work, she interlaces a multitude of scientific, historic, and literary sources, among others, and in this exhibition in particular, the thoughts of Donna Haraway, Ursula K. Le Guin, Emanuele Coccia and the Mundus Subterraneus by Renaissance polymath Athanasius Kircher. Here, Serrano Rivas’ works plot out like the sites on one of Kircher’s magia naturalis maps, a bag of stars, steering us to uncharted territories and the waters of livable futures.