You are warmly invited to the press preview of the exhibition Unearthed Conversation by Francisca García and Mario Navarro at S.M.A.K. on Thursday, 2 April at 11:00, in the presence of the artists and curator Philippe Van Cauteren.
From April 3 to September 13, 2026, S.M.A.K. presents the exhibition Unearthed Conversation by the Chilean artists Francisca García and Mario Navarro. At its core is the Atacama Desert at the mouth of the Loa River in northern Chile, a landscape where archaeology, science, and political history converge. From traces of the ancient Chango culture and similarities with the surface of Mars to the presence of the world’s largest telescopes and the scars of Pinochet’s dictatorship, the exhibition unravels stories and traces of forgotten pasts.
García and Navarro develop the connection between two landscapes and geographies - Atacama and Mars - as a conversation, as suggested by the title of the exhibition. Through sculpture, video, sound, textile, and watercolor, they delve into the idea of the surface as a boundary between the known - made visible when excavated - and the unknown, which lies buried underground and awaits investigation and discovery.
Unearthed Conversation
demonstrates that human “discoveries” are inevitably intertwined with desire, appropriation, and colonization. By drawing attention to the silent material witnesses of a culture, they juxtapose fragile, early forms of discovery with the optimism surrounding contemporary technology. Between the simple hand tools of archaeologists and the high-tech equipment of NASA, Francisca García and Mario Navarro depict worlds that raise essential questions about events between life and death.
The exhibition Unearthed Conversation presents exclusively new work by the artists. In 2022, this project was developed as a proposal for the national pavilion of Chile at the Venice Biennale, but it has only now been realized.
