The cliffs of the Costa Verde—Lima’s most emblematic natural formation—serve as Valentina Maggiolo’s starting point for reflecting on the fraught relationship we establish with the geographical environment we inhabit. The artist’s images may feel unfamiliar, as the cliffs exist in our collective imagination only as aerial shots used for tourism promotion. The landscape she reveals has been obscured by netting that covers its slopes for safety reasons, and architecturally disrupted by buildings that irreversibly alter, in an instant, a geographic profile shaped over billions of years.
Maggiolo confronts us with an environment we have intervened in and symbolically and materially nullified. A ghostly silhouette of the cliffs emerges as an imposing presence looming over the horizon. Different images of the Costa Verde are layered across six vertical fibre cement panels, forming a new configuration that evokes the tension between the construction boom (through the material) and the natural environment.

But the piece also points to the artistic gaze upon the landscape, bringing together two traditions of landscape representation: the horizontal (Western) and the vertical (Eastern). Art-historical traditions are also evoked in a diptych composed of two vertical canvases that, beyond recalling the traditional Chinese style of Shan Shui landscape painting, seem to act as records of the territory—bearing the traces of the cliffs—perhaps as a kind of shroud?

Here, however, that figure verges on abstraction: a synthetic form reminiscent of Arte Povera painting (e.g. Alberto Burri or Giuseppe Penone). The photographic series portrays the landscape but intervenes in it with black rectangles that censor the image at the sites of landslides—a denial of the natural transformations of the cliffs. The contrast between the texture of the netting, the stones, and the concrete of the constructions (buildings, fences) expresses the friction between natural and artificial processes, where the black rectangles suggest areas to be occupied by billboards or structures embedded in the landscape.

The works made with geomesh use the material as though it were a synthetic skin of the terrain, adopting the form of stretched hides, while the installation treats the geomesh not as a veil but as a volume whose contours echo the steep earth slopes and their folds, fissures, landslips, rocky outcrops, and other features of the terrain.

The “lost landscapes” to which Valentina Maggiolo refers are, more accurately, in the process of being lost. The artist points out that the Costa Verde is a vast blind spot in how we perceive Lima, emphasising that the cliffs call on us to become aware of the fleeting nature of our presence in the territory, and of the absurd and ominously lasting mark we leave upon it.