Counterflow

Lorena Solís Bravo & Beáta Kolbašovská

Exhibition curator: Petra Housková

Opening: November 24, 2025 / 6:00 PM

Duration: November 25 – December 31, 2025

Šopa Gallery, Hlavná 40, Košice

Opening hours: TUE – FRI / 3:00 – 6:00 PM

In the abandoned mines of Eastern Slovakia, echoes of pickaxes resonate, acid drainage seeps into rivers, and heavy metals migrate through soil at an invisible pace. Beneath the surface unfolds a slow violence – invisible, yet permanent. It does not arrive as a catastrophe, but as a chronic wound, inscribing itself into the body of the landscape and its inhabitants.

During a two-month residency, Lorena Solís Bravo and Beáta Kolbašovská transform the invisible into the audible. Using hydrophones, geophones, and binaural microphones, they capture sonic reality beyond human perception – the movement of molecules in contaminated waters, microbial processes, resonances of abandoned mines. They collaborate with scientists studying plants and bacteria capable of surviving in toxic conditions and transforming poisons into nutrients. These microscopic beings become keys to a new understanding of remediation – not as a technocentric process, but as a biological, cultural, and imaginative act of care.

From contaminated water, mythology is born. The artists invoke Slavic water and forest spirits – fairies and rusalkas – once bearers of fertility and balance, later demonised as dangerous monsters. The project reveals the deep connection between patriarchal conquest of nature and the demonisation of femininity.

The exhibition features video installations, spatial sound, and 3D scans of mining landscapes, interweaving folklore narratives with scientific data. These hybrid landscapes are simultaneously post-apocalyptic and pre-nascent – sites after catastrophe, yet with the possibility of a new form of coexistence, where human and non-human, scientific and mythological meet in an act of sympoiesis. In a landscape formed by extraction, the artists offer a gesture of listening – presence with what remains wounded.