In this new exhibition, José Rosales merges the themes of two of his previous projects, “Museum of Artificial History” (2020-2022) and “Pequeño fin del mundo”, to offer a profound reflection on nature, history, and the post-human future. Through these works, the artist not only delves into the creation of fictitious and speculative species, but also invites us to reconsider how we conceive the evolution and coexistence of life on Earth, both in the past and in a possible alternative future.
At first glance, we are taken on a journey through a world that seems foreign, distant, perhaps one that comes after our own. However, Rosales poses a fundamental question: Who exactly makes up this “we” we refer to? In “Museum of Artificial History”, the artist recreates small sculptures of animal specimens enclosed in cages, evoking a transatlantic and ironic take on natural history museums. The chimeric creatures that populate this museum speculate on an alternative development of natural history, challenging the supposed neutrality that these spaces try to project. These “obvious falsehoods,” as the artist calls them, highlight colonial distortions in the representation of nature and question the artificiality behind the collections documenting life on the planet.
In “Pequeño fin del mundo”, Rosales extends this exploration into the future, imagining a post-human scenario where species, rather than becoming extinct, reorganize themselves into a new order of coexistence. Here, the fictitious lives and textile objects that fill the space transport us to a possible end of the world that, far from being a total collapse, offers infinite evolutionary possibilities. The artist asks: “What disasters led to this end? How will species adapt? Is a radical communion between them possible?”
In this context, Rosales views the end of the world as an inevitable and imminent process that gives way to a radical reorganization of life on Earth. This exhibition thus becomes a space for reflection on the fragility and resilience of species, proposing a narrative where the end of the world is not a definitive catastrophe, but a transition to something new, a future where life is continuously reimagined.
This unified project immerses us in an alternative universe where the artificial and the natural are intertwined, questioning both the colonial past and the future of life on the planet. The exhibition proposes a speculative dialogue that reexamines the images of nature, from natural history museums to future post-human scenarios, and allows us to imagine other possibilities of coexistence and radical mutualism among species.
