Melanie Smith

Museo Jumex presents the exhibition Un tiempo de libertad en que el mundo había sido posible, a video installation commissioned by both Museo Jumex and the Museo de Arte de Zapopan (MAZ) by the English-Mexican artist Melanie Smith. Its title comes from a line in the short story “Axolotl” by Julio Cortázar, serving as the starting point for the artist’s own interpretation and approach to these amphibians.

Confronting questions of painting and representation, Smith studied axolotls through a research process carried out with biologist Eria Rebollar and curator Helena Chávez Mac Gregor, seeking to imagine what kind of image of them can be produced today. Axolotls have been depicted since Mesoamerican codices and were studied—most notably—by the painter José María Velasco. They also appear in the Cárcamo de Dolores, the hydraulic-engineering mural by Diego Rivera, and became an obsession for the surrealist artist Wolfgang Paalen.

Across these images, axolotls have appeared as deities, subjects of naturalist research, symbols, and allegories. Today, even as they face extinction in their natural habitat, their image proliferates exponentially on banknotes, toys, T-shirts, keychains, and promotional materials—as both cultural commodity and emblem of Mexico City identity.

Smith is fascinated by axolotls as surfaces: as sites of negotiation across membranes—between interior and exterior, across different scales, as projection screens that inevitably evade fixed identity. In this exhibition, she presents an animation that speculates on a world in which axolotls float beyond aquariums and bodies of water, while viewers—positioned in something like a control room, similar to those used to observe outer space—contemplate visual records without knowing whether the amphibians are inside or outside, part of this world, or something distant or yet to come.

In this way, Smith invites audiences to imagine a time of freedom in which the world had once been possible.

Melanie Smith: Un tiempo de libertad en que el mundo había sido posible is part of the program of Festival TONO 2026. Museo Jumex and TONO will host a public program around the project on March 14

— Museo Jumex