Red River extd.

Red River brings together three bodies of work developed through Michael Hirschbichler’s encounters with the Río Tinto in Andalusia. The highly acidic, iron-rich river has been transformed by geological processes, microbial life, and thousands of years of mining. At the same time, it has become a site through which scientists investigate possible conditions on Mars. The exhibition takes this unusual entanglement as its point of departure: a damaged landscape on Earth becomes a material and conceptual threshold to another planet.

Rather than representing the Río Tinto from a distance, Hirschbichler works through direct contact with its waters, sediments, and mineral deposits. This approach forms part of what the artist calls “dirty work”: an artistic and ethnographic method in which places enter the production of images materially. Soils, waters, residues, pigments, and chemically active substances are not treated merely as subjects, but as agents that stain, transform, sediment, and interfere with the work.

In the photographic series Erythrotypes, negatives are exposed to the acidic water of the Río Tinto, allowing the river to chemically alter the photographic image. In the River Paintings, the river deposits its sediments directly onto canvas, where gravity and mineral residue produce the pictorial surface. An excerpt from the film Red River, composed of underwater footage, enters the river itself as an immersive visual field: red, opaque, suspended, mineral, and unstable.

Across photography, painting, and film, the river thus appears less as a landscape to be depicted than as a force that participates in making the images. The works connect questions of contamination, extraction, and material transformation with a broader cosmological perspective: how do earthly environments shape the ways in which other worlds are imagined? And what happens when Mars is approached not only through telescopes, probes, and remote sensing, but through the chemically altered grounds of Earth itself?

Michael Hirschbichler is a transdisciplinary artist working across architecture and anthropology. His practice investigates the relations between material environments and the memories, myths, ideologies, and imaginaries embedded within them. Working with site-specific materials including crude oil, nitrate, mining residues, copper, pulverized buildings, soil, and mud, he develops works that explore possible spatial cosmologies of the present. His work has been shown at Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Het Nieuwe Instituut Rotterdam, Martin-Gropius-Bau Berlin, and Villa Medici Rome, among others. Hirschbichler is Professor of Experimental Creation and founder and director of the Center for Spatial Cosmology at HafenCity University Hamburg (see here).

This exhibition is is part of the Conference „Ethnographies of Outer Space – Situating Postplanetary Futures”, organized by Prof. Dr. Anna Lisa Ramella and team. Prof. Dr. Anna Lisa Ramella is a Junior Professorship for Methods of Cultural Studies and Ruins in Space, Sustainability and Outer Space Imaginaries (KSA Climate Futures in Digital Cultures).