Movimientosde Tierra

Geografía de Color is the line of research that has run through María José Concha Sahli's work for over twenty years. It begins from a hypothesis: we perceive and understand the territories we inhabit through colour, gesture and the layering of surfaces. Colour is not the representation of landscape — it is the form in which landscape inscribes itself in the body of the one who looks at it.

Each project within Geografía de Color — from the cycles produced in southern Patagonia, where the artist lived between 2001 and 2007 and to which she has returned in residency and in sustained connection ever since, to the series made in Santiago, Vevey and Vaud — investigates a specific geographical zone from that premise. Painting, screenprint, drawing and photographic record operate as instruments of a single investigation: to map, not the surface of the territory, but its temperature, its light, its strata.

Movimientos de Tierra is the Swiss chapter of that investigation. It is situated between two mountain ranges — the Andean and the Alpine — and places the geology of the territory in relation to the geology of the artist's own biographical route: in 2024 she made the reverse of the journey undertaken by her great-grandparents, who emigrated from La Chaux-de-Fonds to the Chilean Andes at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Movimientos de Tierra brings together two large-format paintings, a group of screenprints and an artist's carnet in leporello format. All works were produced during the crossing between Chile and Switzerland (2023–2026), and touch Swiss ground for the first time. The mountain range is the recurring figure — not as topographical motif, but as geological body placed in relation to the human body that looks at it and to the migratory displacement itself.

Through colour, gesture and layered surfaces, the work proposes the mountain range as stratum — geological, biographical, temporal — and the displacements that inhabit it (the glacier that loosens, the fault that opens, the body that migrates) as manifestations of a single matter in movement. Ré-habiter la Lumière (2025), the first painting made in Switzerland after the artist's arrival, operates in the exhibition as a bridge between that before and this now.

In Movimientos de Tierra the surface is not a window onto the landscape: it is the place where landscape constitutes itself. Each layer of paint, each screenprint registration, each stroke drawn on the train are strata — deposits of time and decision — placing the geological temporality of the mountain range in relation to the brief temporality of the gesture that records it. The mountain appears as a seemingly stoic body that nonetheless shakes, and human action is not foreign to it: it modifies it, marks it, inhabits it.

The four series articulate this idea across different registers: painting as body seen from the front, the screenprint as tectonic fold in which each registration opens a new form, the leporello as a line that unfolds on the wall. The exhibition does not propose a portrait of the Andean or Alpine landscape, but a listening — to matter, to territory, and to the body that recognises, before the work, that it too is part of that movement.