Nicolás Lamas’ solo exhibition fluid minds at Max Goelitz in Berlin channels the gallery’s foundational inquiry into the complexities of contemporaneity – what gallerist Max Goelitz calls “works that poetically traverse the intersections of our reality.” With sculptural assemblages that fuse organic and synthetic materials, Lamas constructs environments that hybridize the technological and the natural, the industrial and the intimate. These installations function as speculative archaeological sites – animated spaces where objects are not inert fetishes in display cases but carry agency, histories, and potential futures. In this way, fluid minds proposes a post-human animism: an ontological flattening where materiality itself speaks, vibrates, and resists containment.
Lamas shares, “My practice is rooted in the idea that everything is in a state of transition, and that objects, like ideas, are constantly negotiating their meaning in relation to the context they inhabit and the materials they encounter.” The hybrid, for Lamas, is not a static synthesis but a dynamic entanglement. Meaning is always in flux, generated through shifting constellations and tactile dialogues between objects. In the exhibition, the gaze – like the body – moves fluidly across forms: a refrigerator, a hockey helmet cradling coral, a human skull, a Mac skeleton resembling an abacus, a feather, a pill. These juxtapositions friction against one another, producing ephemeral narratives of a world at the edge of sense-making.
Here, post-human animism emerges not as a fantasy but as a critical lens: objects are seen not as passive residues, but as agents in their own right – entities involved in the co-creation of meaning. This reorientation resists the capitalist logic of overproduction and obsolescence, proposing instead a countercultural archaeology for a present haunted by its own debris.
Importantly, Lamas does not impose closed systems. His process is intuitive, often site-responsive. “The process of system-making, for me, is not something that follows a strict plan or hierarchy,” he asserts. “It begins with the accumulation of materials that I find, collect, or keep in my archive, each carrying energy or history. These materials are often chosen intuitively, sometimes without knowing why, but I’m interested in their potential to establish new relationships once they come into contact with other elements.” In this sense, fluid minds embrace an animist epistemology, where intuition, affect, and contingency guide the formation of meaning.
The results are subtle yet charged. Assemblages read like fossilized glitches or interrupted experiments – time collapsing into layered strata. Geological references sit beside disassembled tech; decay mingles with design. Nothing is privileged; natural and artificial matter share equal ontological weight. Through this refusal of hierarchy, Lamas subverts linearity and authorship, offering instead a platform for collective meaning-making.
“His environments function as speculative archaeological sites,” Goelitz adds, “where materials and ideas are in constant flux.” fluid minds become a stage for a theatre of post-human animistic plays – a choreography of tension, balance and interaction, in the artist’s words. Objects and images intertwine in a shifting and fluid constellation to think of the practical and political separation between human and non-human, both intended as technology and nature.
Nicolás Lamas’s work is on view at Max Goelitz in Berlin until July 5, 2025. Click here for more info.
words. Ilaria Sponda
