Joana Lourenço | Luís Rocha | Lyz Parayzo | Xiao Zhiyu

The remix fucked up the original

the way drugs fucked up time,

your time.

So wrote Perla Zuñiga*.

The exhibition Arqueologia Remix (Archaeology Remix) speaks to us of rhythm: the time signature of life. To tell time is to measure its units; but to tell is also to tell stories. The great beauty of polysemous words — words that hold more than one meaning — is that sometimes they meet in the same sentence and, for a moment, become accomplices in a small mystery, producing jolts in the reading, to the euphoric benefit of the text’s musicality. It is like when three people in the same house are called João, and someone calls them to dinner.

Archaeology and remix appear here as opposing forces in relation to time: one seems to preserve the original, while the other takes it apart. Each offers a different way of imagining how we might inhabit the future — either through a conservative impulse that maintains existing structures, or through a progressive movement that radically transforms them.

And yet this is not simply another binary opposition. What is most interesting about these two concepts is that, even as they imagine the future, their practice is deeply reformist: a motto, but also a mode of survival. Archaeology does not merely look back to the past, just as remix does not begin from a point of pure origin. Both work with inherited materials, reorganising them rather than replacing them entirely. In this sense, they share a reformist condition, one capable of generating new rhythms.

The interplay between these three patterns — conservative, reformist and progressive — as proposals for individual and collective life does not unfold in a straight line. It moves between the desire to preserve existing habits, the creation of new ones, and the production of shifting narratives with no stable form.

The nostalgia for what we are, or for what we were only very recently, finds in the promise of other, newly cherished forms a sign of its own possible expression, even as it accompanies our constant farewell to the world as we know it.

It is the artefacts, invested with the status of witnesses to the past, that show us how people travel, how they sleep, how images are archived, or how the landscape is contemplated, with the certainty that everything that shapes a custom also belongs to the intimate choreography through which identities are formed.

But is it really possible to work with the past in relation to the present and the future with the lightness and the confidence that its matter — which we know so well because it has shaped us — can still accompany us, even when altered? In a culture that continuously produces self-images, and in which lived experience and its representation increasingly blur into one another, the question of origin returns with new intentions. Taking up the old question of the chicken and the egg, another one emerges: which came first, us or our culture, us or our memories?

Every day, we engage in highly malleable collective exercises of memory: telling someone what happened last night, posting on a social network, explaining to a friend why we slept badly. And we keep editing this information in order to make sense of the landscape that arrives, and that is always arriving. Perhaps the question admits no definitive answer. We produce culture while being produced by it; we inherit memories that we continuously reorganise through experience. Following archaeology and remix, we too inhabit an intermediate zone between conservation and transformation.

The landscape, like artefacts, also operates as an archive. Both preserve traces of different temporalities and make change visible. What is particular to landscape, however, is that it appears. As a sudden manifestation of time, it emerges like a sacred image, and reading it reveals both past and future.

To look closely at the natural landscape — at a photograph of a mountain range, for example — is to read environmental, economic and social transformations and, in certain cases, migratory flows. I think of the mountains of the northern Iberian Peninsula, arranged in an agile chorus and painted green, white or brown according to the season (another way of perceiving time) while also revealing the marks of stone extraction. Or of the mysterious Nazca Lines in Peru, a group of large geoglyphs traced into the desert floor between 500 BCE and 500 CE by the people of that culture.

In turn, the direction in which we walk tells us where we are going, and the landscape before us becomes the place we will inhabit in the future, at the end of the walk. Given its intimate relationship with time, we may understand landscape as a referential map of the coexistence of the different temporal propositions brought together by the concepts of archaeology and remix.

The encounter between the works of Xiao Zhiyu, Luís Rocha, Lyz Parayzo and Joana Lourenço does not simply illustrate these questions; it sets them in motion. Drawing on figures and materials from the present, the works in dialogue rehearse an archaeological situation, playfully exposing the overlapping temporalities that characterise contemporary life. Between document and invention, archive and recombination, they cast the present as a territory where multiple chronologies coexist, continually unsettling the nostalgic future.

Here, nostalgia acts like a golden shawl, fine and transparent, allowing these non-linear rhythms to recognise, in their alternation, a subtle common moment. It is this moment that holds the vertigo and uncertainty opened by the gaps in the traced pattern. The rhythm is beautiful, and it is ours.

Filipa da Rocha Nunes

June 2026

*Perla Zúñiga (1996–2024, Madrid) was an artist, poet and DJ whose work brought together poetry, performance and electronic music. She died at the age of 27 from a rare cancer that profoundly marked her work. The quotation is part of a poem published in her book Me muero, te quiero, released in 2025 by Blatt & Ríos.