Terraforming

“Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
— Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ozymandias

In Terraforming, Nina Garibay constructs a visual archaeology of power, how it is formed, imposed, inherited, and ultimately undone. Drawing from archival images of Egyptian, Bronze Age, and medieval Christian origin, many sourced from institutional collections such as the British Museum, the Vatican Museum and the Cairo Museum, her paintings assemble civilizations into composite fields where time collapses and authority reveals both its continuity and its limits.

The exhibition begins with a proposition: culture is engineered under conditions of power. What appears as tradition, belief, or identity is often the result of systems imposed to stabilize and organize society. Terraforming, in this sense, is not limited to the physical shaping of land. It names the broader capacity of power to reshape reality at scale. Land becomes territory. Territory becomes system. System becomes belief. What begins as an effort to establish order gradually produces structures that extend control over both environment and population.

This process raises a fundamental question: Is culture shaped by force, or does it mutate through contact? The works suggest that what is often described as syncretism is not a neutral blending, but the residue of systems imposed and later adapted. Forms persist even as their original meanings shift. What survives is not the intact system, but its fragments, reorganized under new conditions.

The material basis of this process is never far from view. The images Garibay draws from were themselves carved from stone, cast from earth, constructed from the ground up to give visible form to authority. In The Golden Hawk, dominion is aligned with divine sanction, recalling how rulers anchored power in the natural and the sacred. In Priestly Family, belief is stabilized through repetition, lineage, and institutional continuity. Authority is not only declared, it is reproduced.

Yet even as these systems consolidate, they begin to detach from their foundations. This is most evident in Fondation, where the figure appears suspended, its base removed, its grounding uncertain. The work points to a stage at which structures remain intact but no longer hold. Authority persists, but its origin has thinned. The system continues, but without stable ground.

Historical precedent makes this condition legible. Egypt, once a center of immense power, was successively absorbed into other empires. Its forms endured, but its sovereignty did not. The British Empire, which later collected and archived many of these remnants, followed a comparable trajectory. Its dominance depended on the control of circulation, trade routes, and strategic passages such as the Suez Canal. When that control weakened, the system it sustained began to falter. Whoever controls the terrain controls the narrative, but terrain itself is never fixed.

This instability is brought into the present in The Tower. Its form recalls the Chrysler Building, a monument to industrial ambition and financial power. Yet here it appears less as a celebration than as a structure under pressure. The tower rises from the same logic that produced earlier monuments: expansion, consolidation, and the projection of permanence. But within that logic lies overextension. Systems expand because they are built to do so. Expansion generates strain. Strain leads to rupture. The collapse of the tower is not an anomaly, but a structural outcome.

In this light, terraforming emerges not as a singular act, but as an ongoing condition. Power reorganizes reality, stabilizes it, extends it, and in doing so produces the conditions for its own instability. What follows is not disappearance, but transformation. The system collapses, yet the terrain it reshaped remains altered. Forms endure. Symbols persist. Meanings are reassigned. Each system leaves behind structures and meanings that persist beyond its control.

If the remnants of past civilizations now appear to us as fragments, rigid, monumental, and partially understood, the future offers no clearer resolution. It remains a terra incognita, shaped by the same processes of control, adaptation, and collapse. What rises will not remain. What falls will not fully vanish. Each new order begins not from nothing, but from what has already been transformed.