Film and literature have explored these themes countless times. In Arrival (Denis Villeneuve, 2016), the language of the heptapods, a non-anthropomorphic alien species, radically transforms the protagonist’s perception of time. Louise Banks doesn’t translate; by learning this circular and visual language, she becomes someone else, in a gesture that directly evokes Le Guin’s idea that “language creates possible realities.” Similarly, in Solaris (Stanisław Lem, 1961), the planet covered by a living ocean doesn’t communicate in human terms, but rather materializes the most intimate and repressed aspects of its inhabitants. There is no direct contact, no common language, but rather a form of affective intelligence that transcends all translation.

And from this framework emerges “The Jungle Was Not a Place: It Was a Being,” an exhibition that establishes a dialogue between the works of Día Muñoz (Guayaquil, 1989) and Job Sánchez (A Coruña, 1979). And although their works differ formally, both seek to rethink proposals within this new narrative-world we have been discussing, while simultaneously exploring interconnected relationships and reflecting on a new language from which to create stories. In Muñoz’s case, this involves technology and nature, and in Sánchez’s, form and space.

In Día Muñoz’s works, matter becomes the narrator of a time before all human history, an abyssal time, where life emerged from volcanic conditions, where LUCA is created.—Last Universal Common Ancestor— Not as a lost fossil, but as a vibrant body still present in what we are and with which we coexist. Through forms that melt, fuse, and intertwine, the sculptures evoke the primordial energy of early organisms. They are liminal creatures, made of glass, wood, moisture, and heat, reminding us that life does not begin at the center, but at the edges, in what seethes, in what remains unseen. The works not only represent this origin, but revive it as a future possibility, as a way of imagining new alliances between species, materials, and temporalities. In this vein, Muñoz proposes a link between the biological and the technological that is not based on opposition, but on fusion and symbiosis. His works not only refer us to a past, but place us in a speculative present where the organic and the artificial can no longer be clearly distinguished. The use of materials such as blown glass or wood, along with forms that suggest the larval, the liquid or the transitional, configure an imaginary that destabilizes the idea of ​​a fixed identity and celebrates mutation as a form of knowledge.

For his part, Job Sánchez’s works, starting from a shared language—recognizable forms from the everyday—become a strategy for subverting the familiar and opening perception to possible realities. Fragments that evoke architectural structures, technical pieces, or graphic elements are assembled together as connective entities, organisms in process, which do not close in on themselves but remain open to change and reconfiguration. Each form contains within itself the possibility of becoming something else, activating a logic of relational multiplicity. More than narrating, his compositions weave connections; they function as living systems where the formal, the spatial, and the symbolic intertwine.

The pieces presented in the exhibition are part of the Domestic Laboratory project and function as speculative still lifes: intimate visual essays where the everyday becomes material for the imagination. Created with colored pencils on high-quality primed paper, these compositions activate a language rooted in the micro, the slow, the carefully crafted. Minimal yet symbolically dense elements appear: matchboxes as containers of fire, seashells as traces of time and habitat, engaging in dialogue with processes that stem from artificial intelligence employed as a device to initiate the process. Everything is articulated through geometric patterns that allude to both the algorithmic and the artisanal, configuring a system that unites the natural and the artificial, the manual and the digital. At this intersection, Domestic Laboratory presents itself as a proposal for a visual language in gestation, a material poem where each fragment is code, sign, and possibility, and where art becomes a space for translation and affective transformation. Sánchez does not represent a closed world, but rather proposes an open formal ecosystem, a collective choreography where each element is part of a larger framework that insists on the possibility of coexistence and continuation.

The exhibition, therefore, is not limited to displaying two bodies of work, but activates a speculative field where alternative forms of coexistence, narration and perception are tested.

Both Muñoz and Sánchez propose languages ​​that move away from linear discourse to delve into the interconnected and the porous. Moreover, at a historical moment where the imagination seems constantly captured by the logic of urgency and collapse, this encounter between artistic practices functions as a counter-narrative: a commitment to slow time, to attentive listening, and to the possibility of creating stories together.