Curating | Jana Johanna Haeckel

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Laura Palau: Mal hora, bon hora.

Laura Palau’s image- and time-based practice grows from an ecological sensibility that understands nature as both teacher and healer. Rooted in ecofeminist and Indigenous thought, and nourished by the rural knowledge of her upbringing, her work practices care as a form of resistance—mending the fractures between human and nature, rural and urban, local and global, trauma and healing. Often collaborative, her artistic explorations invite communities to take part as co-authors, reimagining our relationship with the more-than-human world beyond the boundaries of Western thought.

At the centre of the exhibition lies the practice of Tretzenades—a form of folk
meteorology rooted in Catalonia, Valencian Community, and neighboring regions. This traditional method of weather divination unfolds over thirteen days (tretze meaning “thirteen” in Catalan), during which daily atmospheric observations are used to infer the conditions of the months ahead. Once a pragmatic tool guiding sowing, pruning, harvest, and water management, Tretzenades also served as a mnemonic ritual, encoding communal seasonal memory and aligning human activity with the cycles of the land. The practice endures as a quiet gesture of attunement, bridging empirical observation with embodied, ancestral knowledge.

The exhibition brings together a constellation of cloud photographs—captured by Laura Palau, by friends of the artist, and through found imagery. Together, these images form a collaborative archive of shifting skies, tracing the mutable patterns of time and inviting visitors to engage in acts of speculative interpretation.

At its heart, the four-channel video installation Mal hora, bon hora (“Good weather, bad weather” in Catalan) unfolds through the seasons of spring, summer, autumn, and winter. It interweaves interviews with a local villager, José Ramón, filmed over the past year, with meditative and experimental sequences recorded in the surrounding landscapes. The film’s cyclical structure echoes the rhythms of rural life and theagricultural calendar, reflecting on ways of sensing, predicting, and coexisting with the natural world.

The final room presents glass sculptures, portraits of trees affected by natural
disasters, as well as archival material placed on tables that trace the intertwined
histories of weather observation, forecasting, and climate change. Referencing another form of vernacular meteorology, the glass sculpture in the shape of an onion draws on the so-called onion calendar — a traditional method of predicting rainfall and humidity by observing how salt interacts with layers of a cut onion.

In foregrounding these living folk traditions, the exhibition considers how ecological
knowledge and ancestral wisdom might coexist and teach us during a present of
human-induced environmental crisis. Together, the works speak to the enduring desire to read the sky, while asking us to be attentive and learn to interpret wildlife’s indicators, such as the appearance of the cuckoo or the fleeing of birds before the arrival of floods or fires.

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