Counterflow
Lorena Solís Bravo & Beáta Kolbašovská
This installation is on show at Bak Basecamp
In the abandoned mines of eastern Slovakia, extraction continues long after industry has departed. Heavy metals migrate through soil and water; contamination resonates below the threshold of sight. In Counterflow, Lorena Solís Bravo and Beáta Kolbašovská render this slow violence audible. Through hydrophones, geophones, binaural microphones and spatial sound, they attune us to molecular drift, subterranean vibration, and the echo of hollowed shafts. Listening becomes method: a way of knowing that exceeds the visual and challenges the hierarchy of perception.
The installation interweaves 3D scans, video, toxic sediments, and fluvial cartographies that resemble veins or roots. A sunflower emerges from arsenic-laden matter—an emblem of phytoremediation, where plants absorb and metabolize toxicity. Here, remediation is not framed as technocratic control but as symbiosis: a collaboration between human, vegetal, mineral, and microbial agencies.
Drawing on Slavic cosmologies that once recognized rivers as living beings, Counterflow proposes a recalibration of relationship. Technology operates not as an extractive tool, but as an interface for ancestral listening—translating hidden frequencies into shared experience. Against the current of industrial logic, the work invites us to inhabit another flow: one of reciprocity, care, and ecological repair.
Image by Tibor Czito