Art can sometimes explain an environmental problem better than a thousand scientific reports. That is the idea behind Drinking Mercury, a new exhibition opening in La Paz, Bolivia, where artists are confronting mercury pollution caused by illegal and artisanal gold mining around the reservoirs that supply drinking water to more than a million people.
The exhibition, curated by Naira Corzon Cortez and presented through apexart, runs from October 17 through November 13, 2026 at Casa Passiflora in La Paz. It brings together work by Viviana Mamani Cori, Nayra Corzon, Wara Vargas Lara and Mariel Terán across photography, sound, video and installation.
The underlying story is not abstract. Gold mining has expanded around the Hampaturi, Milluni and Incachaca reservoirs, while mercury used in gold extraction is entering the watershed. Mining has also reached the slopes of Illimani, the sacred Andean mountain overlooking La Paz.
Water moves and mercury moves. Pollution does not respect the neat boundaries we draw between a mine, a river, a kitchen tap and a human body. And this is where art can become a particularly powerful form of environmental activism.
One of the earliest environmental-art stories I wrote, long before Green Prophet became what it is today, was about New Mexico photographer Laurie Tümer. I wrote about her Glowing Evidence series for Grist and later TreeHugger.
Tümer had suffered a serious pesticide poisoning after her home was sprayed. She later became interested in the research of environmental scientist Richard Fenske, who used fluorescent tracer dyes and ultraviolet light to demonstrate how pesticides could migrate onto agricultural workers’ bodies even when they wore protective equipment.
Tümer borrowed the technique artistically. She put fluorescent tracers on shoes, surfaces and objects and photographed their movement under UV light. Suddenly an invisible environmental threat became visible.
The photographs were beautiful, almost celestial. But once you understood what the glowing patterns represented, they became disturbing. That is what environmental art can do exceptionally well. Science can tell us that contamination exists at a certain concentration. Art can help us understand what it means for a substance to move from soil to water, from water to hands, from hands into homes and eventually into bodies.
Drinking Mercury works in a similar territory.
Wara Vargas Lara’s All Rivers Flow into the Sea documents mining and gold extraction in the Bolivian Amazon and around Milluni, emphasizing a simple ecological reality: water systems are connected. Viviana Mamani Cori’s video Permissible Limits questions how contamination is represented publicly. Nayra Corzon transforms environmental laws and books into damaged landscapes overtaken by moss and biological material, while Mariel Terán’s Earth Hands uses Andean instruments, sound and earth to examine what remains alive in landscapes being excavated.
The exhibition does not simply illustrate pollution. It turns an invisible environmental threat into something people can experience.
And perhaps that is one of art’s most useful environmental functions: not frightening people for the sake of fear, but giving shape to something that otherwise remains unseen. Once contamination can be seen, heard or imagined moving through a landscape, it becomes much harder to pretend it stops somewhere upstream.
