Geografía de Color

Geografía de Color is the line of research that has run through María José Concha Sahli's work for over twenty years. It begins from a hypothesis: we perceive and understand the territories we inhabit through colour, gesture and the layering of surfaces. Colour is not the representation of landscape — it is the form in which landscape inscribes itself in the body of the one who looks at it.

Each project within Geografía de Color — from the cycles produced in southern Patagonia, where the artist lived between 2001 and 2007 and to which she has returned in residency and in sustained connection ever since, to the series made in Santiago, Vevey and Vaud — investigates a specific geographical zone from that premise. Painting, screenprint, drawing and photographic record operate as instruments of a single investigation: to map, not the surface of the territory, but its temperature, its light, its strata.

Movimientos de Tierra is the Swiss chapter of that investigation. It is situated between two mountain ranges — the Andean and the Alpine — and places the geology of the territory in relation to the geology of the artist's own biographical route: in 2024 she made the reverse of the journey undertaken by her great-grandparents, who emigrated from La Chaux-de-Fonds to the Chilean Andes at the beginning of the twentieth century.