Through a residency in Mompox, Colombia, Adriana Salazar Vélez connects the waterscapes of her home in Mexico City with Colombia’s Magdalena River. As an apprentice to local fishermen, Salazar learned to weave atarrayas—a nearly extinct casting net practice—while absorbing the profound ecological knowledge inherent to fishing. Weaving, in an expanded sense, has become a method for catching worlds, and a way to embody and preserve these teachings. Each knot inscribes knowledge, transforming learning into lived experience. This practice reveals the atarraya as more than a craft; in this project, it becomes a strategy for rootedness in territories where water has been dispossessed. In Mexico City, built over its ancient lakes, this knowledge is brought into dialogue with the urban environment within the exhibition. Through a collaboration with local communities, the project reawakens submerged waters, using the net’s expansive weave to reconnect bodies, built space, and ecological entanglements.

Adriana Salazar Vélez is a Colombian artist, researcher, and educator based in Mexico City. Her work explores the ways western knowledge traditions separate the world into living and inanimate things. She appropriates practices from various disciplines to create spaces where this division can be blurred. For the last decade, she has committed her artistic practice to working with the water flows of central Mexico, aiming to subvert the perception of water as a lifeless object. Salazar has exhibited her projects extensively in international as well as local venues. She is a professor and researcher at Santiago de Chile’s Catholic University. She also writes and edits books and texts for artistic and academic publications, including the volumes Lake Texcoco: Encyclopedia of Things Living and Dead (Pitzilein Books, 2019) and Water Spells (Pitzilein, 2022).