Mouraux Durand-Ruel Gallery is pleased to present The World We Keep Afloat, an exhibition featuring fifteen works by Lucy and Jorge Orta, on view November 5, 2026 – January 9, 2027, at 555 West 25th Street in Chelsea, New York. Bringing together unique works on paper in pencil, pigment ink and watercolor alongside limited-edition prints, the exhibition traces three interconnected bodies of work: Antarctica, Amazonia and Connector Mobile Village. These bodies of work examine how shelter, biodiversity and survival depend upon cooperation.

Living and working in Paris, Lucy Orta, born in the United Kingdom (1966), and Jorge Orta, born in Argentina (1953), have collaborated since the early 1990s, developing an interdisciplinary practice. The key questions driving their work reflect on, how we inhabit the world equitably, equitable access to resources, the mobility and displacement of communities, social bonds, climate change and the accelerating loss of biodiversity. Internationally recognized for ambitious installations, public interventions and participatory projects, their work has been presented at the Venice, Johannesburg, Gwangju, Havana, Lyon, Shanghai, Diriyah biennales and at institutions including the Hayward Gallery, the Barbican the V&A and Natural History Museum in London, MAXXI in Rome, and Centre Pompidou-Metz. (Insert US)

The exhibition begins with works on paper with the artists’ expedition to the Antarctic, addressing environmental conditions and human survival in adverse situations. Following a commission from the first End of the World Biennale in 2007, the Ortas installed the ephemeral Antarctic Village – No Borders (2007) on the continent: a settlement composed of fifty dome-shaped shelters constructed from national flags, second-hand clothing, webbing and textiles. Working with scientists at Marambio Base, they transformed the Antarctic ice flats into the site of both a real encampment and an imagined community beyond national borders.

Antarctica is an extreme environment, where survival makes mutual aid essential, and one of the rare territories governed through international cooperation and dedicated to peaceful scientific research. Lucy + Jorge Orta extended this idea to the Antarctic Flag (2007) as a symbol of nations united around shared values and the Antarctica World Passport (2008), a participatory project inviting individuals to become citizens of a world community. More than 100,000 passports have been distributed, replacing nationality identity with shared values of hope, peace and equity. The expedition drawings translate these ideas into a compelling visual vocabulary. Drop parachutes carrying vital supplies open over a white landscape dotted with colourful dome shelters where figures are preparing the terrain for future inhabitants.

Two years later, the artists travelled to one of the most fragile biomes on Earth, Amazonia. Joining a scientific expedition, Lucy + Jorge Orta partook in environmental research with the Environmental Change Institute. At the Manú Biosphere Reserve they assisted with species monitoring and data collection, while photographing, filming and sketching the flora and fauna encountered. The expedition confronted them with extraordinary abundance, but also with an ecosystem increasingly threatened by deforestation, climate change and biodiversity loss. This field work led to a monographic exhibition as part of the contemporary art programme at the Natural History Museum London (2010), launching their long-term project Amazonia.

The Amazonia Expedition Drawings transform their findings into poetic responses. Rather than depicting the rainforest as one research site, the Ortas draw our attention to the interconnected nature of ecology, to the fragility and necessity to safeguard biodiversity worldwide through abundant imaginary and real flowers, seeds, figures cohabiting a vast spatial plane.

In Amazonia Lifeguard (2016), two hooded figures support a stretcher-bed carrying plants, seeds and animals. In Amazonia Drop Parachute, a parachute descends from above with a cascade of flowers and seeds, as though biodiversity itself were being air-dropped into a territory in need of repair. In both works, the visual language of rescue is redirected toward the fragile environments where emergency equipment becomes a means of imagining how an ecosystem might be regenerated in the face of deforestation. The images remain colorful and poetic, but the sense of urgency is unmistakable.

Unlike the Antarctica and Amazonia drawings, Connector Mobile Village does not take place within an identifiable geography. Initiated around 2000, the project imagines individual units that can connect, separate and reconnect according to the needs of a community. In Connector Mobile Village (2017), these structures radiate from a series of central axes like satellites, cells or parts of an imaginary ecosystem. Architectural modules connect to organic forms; bodies connect to habitats; water, food, shelter and plant life occupy the same network. The image gradually reads like a floating ecosystem in which social and natural life have become inseparable.

Throughout the Amazonia works, even when human figures appear, they rarely dominate the composition. Instead, the focus is on the wider network linking humans to non-humans and the environments they share, a community understood as both social and ecological.

On paper, the Ortas can move freely between something observed and the world they imagine within it. Pencil allows the imperceptible details of living organisms and their interconnected relationships to be mapped with precision, while watercolor and pigment ink introduce the delicate yet intense color that gives these works their sense of life and poetry.

Across these works, Lucy + Jorge Orta do not illustrate environmental or social crises, but give form to possible alternatives. The World We Keep Afloat brings this vision into focus. From a temporary village on the Antarctic ice, to the biodiversity of the Amazon rainforest, and finally to the multi-nodal network of Connector Mobile Village, the exhibition expands the meaning of community. The world the Ortas imagine is not sustained by a single heroic act, but by countless forms of mutual aid between people, across borders, and with the biodiversity on which we depend.