by Adela Lovric // July 29, 2025
This article is part of our feature topic Water.
Entering ‘Liquid Mantras,’ Patricia Domínguez’s solo exhibition at Kunstverein Arnsberg, visitors first encounter an exhibition-within-the-exhibition. Titled ‘Aguas Etéricas’ (Ethereal Waters), it features water-themed works on paper by Domínguez and her artistic-activist tribe that includes her mother, Patricia Claro and close friends, Antonia Taulo and Susanne Treister. From the outset, collaboration sets the tone for the show. Female solidarity emerges as both methodology and ethic; a declaration of the artist’s worldview that emphasizes community and interdependence over individualism.
Artwork by Patricia Claro, part of ‘Aguas Etéricas’ in Patricia Domínguez: ‘Liquid Mantras,’ 2025, Kunstverein Arnsberg // Photo by Michel Ptasinski
In ‘Liquid Mantras,’ Domínguez uses a mix of digital and traditional media to expose the severe scarcity of water in Chile and the conditions it creates. “After the dictatorship [of Augusto Pinochet], the main common goods were privatized,” she explains. “The corporations have bought not only 100% of the water rights, but 200%; they’ve been overbought.” Now facing the 14th year of a mega-drought, Chile operates under a system where water rights are traded like stocks. Corporations divert rivers into private reservoirs to sustain monocultures—primarily avocados and citrus—while nearby communities go without running water, animals perish from thirst and native forests disappear. Witnessing this destruction firsthand, “the notion of water as part of [bodily] fluids stayed in my mind,” Domínguez recalls. “Women say they no longer have tears to cry; they don’t have water to give birth.”
Patricia Domínguez: ‘Liquid Mantras,’ 2025, exhibition view at Kunstverein Arnsberg // Photo by Michel Ptasinski
‘Liquid Mantras’ doesn’t just narrate ecological collapse; it mourns, resists and speculates. The artist transforms grief into ritual and brings activism into the exhibition space through spiritual fiction, or spi-fi—a term she uses to describe her practice that combines sci-fi aesthetic and spiritual politics. For this exhibition, she mainly worked with women as “they especially understand the spiritual importance of water.” At the heart of it is ‘La balada de las sirenas secas’ (The Ballad of the Dry Mermaids), an installation created in collaboration with Mujeres del Agua, a collective of female activists—herbalists, healers, artists and teachers—ranging in age from 11 to 68. They appear in the video performing a ritual of water reverence, carefully sharing each drop, improvising with gesture and rhythm in the dry, devastated landscapes of Petorca. The ritual reflects the material reality in this area of Chile, where the river has been reduced to a memory and the beaches have become an archaeological vestige.
Patricia Domínguez: ‘Liquid Mantras,’ 2025, exhibition view at Kunstverein Arnsberg // Photo by Michel Ptasinski
Domínguez presents her collaborators as agents of knowledge and resistance, attuned to water in complex, multidimensional ways. During the pandemic, she notes, Mujeres del Agua were more effective than the government in distributing water throughout the region, saving the lives of both residents and animals. In one scene in the video, they gather moisture from morning dew; in another, they grieve amid the skeletal remains of avocado trees. The video also features a moving presence of Don Juan López, a practitioner of canto divino (a traditional form of devotional singing), which he has adapted to lament the drought. Seated among animal carcasses in an arid landscape, dressed in a futuristic LED-lit suit, he sings to the fallen creatures, his voice accompanied by the ominous whirring of a drone that eerily replaces the absent hum of insects.
Patricia Domínguez: ‘Liquid Mantras,’ 2025, exhibition view at Kunstverein Arnsberg // Photo by Michel Ptasinski
The installation surrounding the video conjures a surreal sci-fi scene. At its center, a hybrid mermaid-cyborg figure, illuminated by glowing LED lights, kneels in prayer before a screen set atop a cracked-earth altar. Flanking the screen, two cartoonish avocado figures with tongues lolling hover like spectral guardians. These personified fruits recur throughout the exhibition, appearing in the video and as holograms on the walls. Cast as inadvertent villains with insatiable thirst, they symbolize the businesses that divert freshwater from local communities to their plantations. In this space, ritual becomes a device that bridges past and future, and humor—elevated to a form of spiritual practice—tempers the weight of mourning.
Patricia Domínguez: ‘Liquid Mantras,’ 2025, exhibition view at Kunstverein Arnsberg // Photo by Michel Ptasinski
The exhibition is part of ‘Swamping,’ Kunstverein Arnsberg’s ongoing two-year program, which aims to raise awareness of the principle of wetlands and swamping as an ecological strategy. As curator Pauline Doutreluingne notes, ‘Swamping’ is “about Indigenous ways of connection and thinking, and to swamp something is to make something more fluid, more connected.” Domínguez’s work is essential to this project because “she links various ecological crises with resistance and the possibility for regeneration through engagement with Indigenous thinking.” This relationship is most vividly invoked in the exhibition’s final room, where a facsimile of the Troano Codex, one of the four surviving pre-Columbian Maya books, rests on a mirrored shelf. Soft meditative soundscapes accompany this sacred artifact about the Mayan rain deity, providing a setting for reflection and communion with the spirit of water.
Patricia Domínguez: ‘Liquid Mantras,’ 2025, exhibition view at Kunstverein Arnsberg // Photo by Michel Ptasinski
Rather than projecting a vague sense of hope—which could feel detached and dismissive in light of the harsh realities and brutal repression faced by those who approach the water crisis not as a drought, but as a theft—‘Liquid Mantras’ focuses on what continues to endure beyond the narrow, extractivist timelines of late capitalism. Practices of care, community, solidarity and spirituality aren’t framed as aspirational slogans but as ongoing, tangible responses to systemic neglect of all forms of life. In Domínguez’s exhibition, the altar functions as a central space for upholding this struggle, where ritual operates as a form of resistance, and art becomes a means of nurturing collective resilience.
Exhibition Info
Kunstverein Arnsberg
Patricia Domínguez: ‘Liquid Mantras’
Exhibition: June 27-Aug. 24, 2025
kunstverein-arnsberg.de
Königstraße 24, 59821 Arnsberg, click here for map
