dialogue #13 Catarina Osório de Castro: Pó de Estrelas (Interstellar Dust) / Uriel Orlow – “We Have Already Lived Through Our Future – We Just Don’t Remember It”

Catarina Osório de Castro – “Pó de Estrelas (Interstellar Dust)”
Dialogue presents “Pó de Estrelas (Interstellar Dust)”, a new photographic series by Catarina Osório de Castro, accompanied by a text by Joerg Bader. The exhibition unfolds through a sequence of closely framed images taken in botanical gardens and greenhouses across Europe, where the artist reflects on the relationship between nature, perception, and time. Her photographs capture plants, stones, and human figures with striking precision and restraint, evoking cycles of growth, decay, and transformation.

Marked by a Taoist sensitivity to change and impermanence, Osório de Castro’s work moves between silence and revelation, suggesting a continuity between the organic and the celestial. The title refers to the scientific concept that all living beings are composed of stardust, connecting the microcosm of the greenhouse to the immensity of the universe. Through these meditative images, the artist contemplates transience and the porous boundaries between matter, spirit, and light.

Uriel Orlow – “We Have Already Lived Through Our Future – We Just Don’t Remember It”
In parallel, Dialogue presents Uriel Orlow’s video “We Have Already Lived Through Our Future – We Just Don’t Remember It” together with “Forest Manifesto”, a series of riso prints inviting reflection on ecological interdependence. Uriel Orlow’s artistic work is based on historical research across a wide range of fields, whether it concerns the history of a mental hospital in Jerusalem that was a Palestinian village, botany and its colonial past, or the so-called bronzes of the Kingdom of Benin looted by the British army in 1897. Known for a practice that combines scientific observation with poetic speculation, Orlow addresses themes of colonial legacies, environmental transformation, and collective memory.

The video centres on the discovery of the planet’s earliest fossilised conifer forest, linking deep geological time to imagined futures. Through the voices of children, it envisions more-than-human perspectives and alternative ways of coexisting. Developed during an art and ecology residency at the BAU Institute in Bolzano, the project positions the forest as both teacher and protagonist, proposing new forms of relational awareness.

Together, the two exhibitions trace the interconnectedness of natural, historical, and cosmic cycles, offering a meditation on continuity, renewal, and the shared matter of all existence.