LO QUE ESTA JUNTO A LA ORILLA (Anthropocene Series)

The Anthropocene Series emerged during the research process for Lo que está junto a la orilla, developed by Bárbara Palomino-Ruiz during her artistic residency in Cantabria. Although it was not included in the resulting exhibition, the series constitutes a parallel body of work rooted in the artist’s observation of the landscape surrounding the River Pas.

Through photography, research, collage, and mixed media, Palomino-Ruiz gathers and reorganises fragments encountered along the riverbank: geological formations, vegetation, construction materials, waste, and other traces of human intervention. Rather than treating landscape as a stable or purely natural image, the series approaches it as a surface in which different temporalities and material histories overlap.

The collages bring natural and manufactured elements into proximity, unsettling the distinctions between geological processes, archaeological remains, and contemporary debris. Through acts of selection, fragmentation, juxtaposition, and recomposition, the work examines how materials become evidence of environmental and human transformation.

Situated between field observation and speculative archaeology, the series considers the Anthropocene not as a distant or abstract condition, but as something registered in ordinary materials and local environments. What lies by the shore becomes a record of entangled processes: erosion and accumulation, construction and decay, natural transformation and human activity.