Drawing on a long-held and thorough engagement with Argentine visual artist Marta Minujín’s practice, Andrea Lissoni follows her conceptual threads in this essay, experiencing their profound continuity firsthand during the installation of the group exhibition Inside Other Spaces. Environments by Women Artists 1956–1976, presented at Haus der Kunst München in 2023–2024. Rooted in a reflection on Minujín’s prescient relationship to technology, going back as far as her 1965 spatial installation La menesunda (1965), these reflections trace how the artist anticipated contemporary concerns well before her time, and seamlessly embraced new forms of media as they emerged, crucially not as a tool for simple interaction or immediacy, but as a mode of public engagement.

In this essay, which is inflected with personal anecdotes and indelible impressions from Minujín’s more than 50-year career, Lissoni considers the role of public artworks today, pointing to the artist’s ability to surpass the all-too-common pitfalls of monumentality in favor of collective encounter.

This intimate conversation between artist Sandra Vásquez de la Horra and curator Jana Baumann unfolded in the context of the Chilean artist’s 2025–2026 survey exhibition Soy Energía at Haus der Kunst München.

Vásquez de la Horra and Baumann explore aspects of the artist’s practice that reverberate in the show, from encounters with Indigenous knowledge and “energetic” landscapes during her childhood in northern Chile, to the way spiritual practices like Buddhism, Taoism, and Afro-Caribbean religions have deeply informed her cosmological view.

Speaking fluidly and moving organically between past and present associations, they tap into the influential relationships and invaluable references that culminate in the artist’s motto and title of this show: Soy Energía [I Am Energy]—an insistence that one is never the same person throughout one’s life, that energies fluctuate. Embracing this motto, Vásquez de la Horra’s 2025 installation Soy el horizonte infinito [I Am the Infinite Horizon], which she describes as “a great liberation,” speaks to a much-needed reconciliation between humans and nature—“a vision of a geographical map on which I can exist.”

The texts in this volume are drawn from a series of conversations with Tomás Saraceno, during the preparation of the exhibition Ancestral Futures at Haus der Kunst Munich in 2026.

At the center of these conversations is El Santuario del Agua [The Sanctuary of Water, 2026], a hyperlocal sculpture conceived for and built on the salt flats of northern Argentina. The idea emerged in dialogue over the last ten years with various Indigenous leaders and activists opposing lithium extraction in the region. Inspired in part by the form of the apacheta—a mound of stones placed along Andean paths as a gesture of offering and orientation—the work developed into a monument to water, a protection zone, and a site that orients the landscape toward futures that sustain the communities defending it.

What follows is a record of an artwork being thought through as a fragile, entangled, and collective form—one that extends across land, infrastructure, ecology, and social relations, appearing simultaneously in Salinas Grandes in Argentina and at Haus der Kunst Munich in Germany. It asks what it means to make and sustain an artwork under conditions of ecological urgency and collective responsibility, because, as Saraceno puts it: “it’s the same water. It’s the same world.”

Encounters is a collection of publications that emerges from exchanges between artists and cultural practitioners. The first three issues focus on a series of exhibitions at Haus der Kunst Munich between 2024 and 2026. Encounters seeks to capture the dialogue that organically unfolds through these meetings.