Alexandra Gelis, Bromelias: Inhabiting Water, 2025
BROMELIAS: Inhabiting Water
Alexandra Gelis
A Space Main Gallery
September 12 – October 24, 2026
Reception and Artist Talk October 8, 2026, 7:00 pm–9:00 pm
Bromelias: Inhabiting Water is a new iteration of Alexandra Gelis’s long-term research-creation project AGUA, developed through living and working alongside the Río El Vacilón, near Carara National Park and surrounding protected forest, Costa Rica.
Before the camera, there was a body learning how to walk again.
The dry bed of the Río El Vacilón became a path, but never a stable one. Alexandra learned to move slowly, listening with her feet and adjusting her body to stones, snakes, insects, sudden currents, humidity, and the changing breath of the forest. Walking became a way of filming before making an image. The camera arrived later.
Then the bromeliads became guides.
High in the tropical canopy, bromeliads grow upon trees and gather rainwater within the folds of their leaves. Water remains there, suspended above the river, forming small reservoirs where frogs, insects, and microorganisms live among sediment and decomposing matter. Each plant holds a body of water. Each body of water holds other bodies.
The river was not only on the ground. It was also above her.
Bromeliads are often mistaken for parasites and removed from trees. But what happens when we approach them as ecological infrastructures, as water keepers, habitats, and teachers? What forms of attention become possible when a plant is no longer reduced to scenery, symbol, or raw material, but encountered as a living participant in the work?
Across the exhibition, water appears as path, force, habitat, and co-maker. It cuts through terrain, gathers within leaves, transforms plant matter, and carries bodies, images, and sounds.
Moving images, sound, vibration, plant fibres, drawings, electronics, and sculptural structures carry traces of Alexandra’s encounters with water and the forest. Images move between monitors, projections, fibres, and sculptural matter. They do not sit apart from these materials. They inhabit them.
Fallen and discarded plant matter is gathered, cooked, washed, separated, and transformed with river water. The resulting fibre surfaces are not supports waiting for an image. They are already images. Already stories. They remember plant tissue, heat, hand, sediment, weather, and time.
The bromeliads, the river, the forest, and its earthbound and airborne lives guide the work across different scales: visible and invisible, macroscopic and microscopic. Walking becomes a way of occupying multiple positions at once, thinking with different parts of the body, and allowing weather, critter companions, and remnants of life on the forest floor to participate in the making.
Worlds within worlds.
Bromelias: Inhabiting Water brings these encounters into the gallery as a sensory and multidimensional environment. Moving between riverbed and canopy, between water flowing below and water held above, visitors enter a field of relations already inhabited by many other bodies and forms of life.