Festival Art Souterrain

The Mexican Cultural Institute Montreal/ESPACIO MÉXICO presents, in collaboration with Art souterrain 2025, Mirrors of the Holobiont by Mexican artist Marcela Armas. This is an ongoing artistic research project that explores the Habitat through symbolic and tangible relationships between two mirrored territories: the human body and the soils of the Earth.

The project seeks to establish a complementary connection between iridology and soil chromatography, two analytical methodologies that support health diagnostic processes through the observation of the human iris and the Earth’s soils.

This project weaves together a diversity of stories and perspectives from farmers and individuals involved in agroecological practices. It reflects on the impact of agro-industry and patented biotechnologies in contrast with free knowledge, tools, technologies, and methodologies. It addresses themes of autonomy and dependence, as well as complexity, diversity, and resilience across a broad spectrum of contexts and levels of adversity in the human relationship with nature through agriculture and food.

The holobiont refers to organisms considered as an ecological unit together with all their associated microorganisms in symbiosis – the microbiome. It is a fundamental concept in the study of symbiotic associations, their ecology, and their evolution.