Melanie Smith: exhibition on endangered animals.

The exhibition “Only one thing was strange, to keep thinking like before” brings together the latest productions by Mexican-British artist Melanie Smith, including “Estudios para ajolote” (2025) and “Tixinda” (2025). Both projects revolve around two endangered animals: the Mexican Axolotl, of which between 500 and 1,000 individuals remain in their natural habitat, and the purple snail, today only inhabiting, in danger, the coasts of Oaxaca in Mexico. Under the question of gaze and image, Smith searches in painting, drawing, video, and sculpture for ways to approach these forms of life without generating deterministic representations. With these works she questions the separation between culture and nature, overcomes an ontological hierarchy of living beings, and evokes a poetics that invites a more empathetic, more curious way of looking.