Patricia Domínguez

Patricia Domínguez

Gaiaguardianxs, 2020

Installation with an interactive publication on a touch-screen and two printed shirts
162 x 146 cm 
Commissioned by Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary for How to Tread Lightly
TBA21 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary Collection

Gaiaguardianxs is a multi-chapter, interactive digital publication that anchors Patricia Domínguez’s deep engagement with ecology, Indigenous knowledge, and spiritual resistance. Structured as a seven-part journey, the work distills three years of ethnobotanical and sociopolitical research across Latin America into a visually rich and emotionally charged narrative. At its heart is a spiritual guide: a blind toucan, whose real-life suffering during the devastating wildfires in the Chiquitania region of Bolivia becomes a symbol of environmental and multispecies grief.

Guided by this mythic companion, the reader traverses regions scarred by environmental extractivism and social injustice. Each chapter unfolds as a poetic testimony, combining personal narrative, fieldwork, and digital storytelling. Domínguez constructs a tapestry of resistance—from the Indigenous mobilizations in Bolivia’s Tenth March for the Rights of Nature to the civil uprisings in Chile demanding equitable access to resources. These accounts, interwoven with the voices of rivers, spirits, and communities, critique neoliberal transformations while affirming the resilience of both human and nonhuman worlds.

In Gaiaguardianxs, Domínguez proposes a new kind of cartography—one that privileges emotion, mourning, and connectivity over conquest. The project is a digital altar, a political ecology, and a call to spiritual kinship in an era of planetary crisis.

PAST EXHIBITIONS
 

Group show: América Latina y el Caribe, Bajo presión (Under Pressure)

Venue: Trienale de Poli/Gráfica, San Juan, Puerto Rico

Date: April 18, 2024 - September 15, 2024

Group show: Abundant Futures

Curator: Daniela Zyman
Venue: C3A Centro de Creación Contemporánea de Andalucía, Córdoba  
Date: April 1, 2022 - March 5, 2023

Group show: How to Tread Lightly

Curator: Soledad Gutiérrez

Venue: National Museum Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

Date: October 5, 2020 – January 17, 2021

DIVE DEEPER:

Natasha Daly, “Amazonía: Los esfuerzos para ayudar a los animales afectados por los incendios”, in National Geographic, September 26, 2019. here

Fernanda Paúl, “Protestas en Chile: 4 claves para entender la furia y el estallido social en el país sudamericano”, in BBC, October 20, 2019. here

Isidora Cepeda Beccar, “Ciudadanía crítica y bien común. La demanda del agua como bien común en la provincia de Petorca, Chile” (Thesis: University of Leiden, The Netherlands, 2016). here 

Alexander Panez-Pinto et al., “Politización de la crisis hídrica en Chile: Análisis del conflicto por el agua en la provincia de Petorca”, in Agua y Territorio 10 (2017): 131-148. here

Paola Bolados García et al., “La eco-geo-política del agua: una propuesta desde los territorios en las luchas por la recuperación del agua en la provincia de Petorca (Zona central de Chile)”, in Revista Rupturas 8 (2019). here