Galerie Cécile Fakhoury is pleased to announce Le poisson vient avec la pluie (Fish Come with the Rain), a solo exhibition by artist Rachel Marsil, on view at Fundación Casa Wabi, Mexico city, from July 12 to September 27, 2025.
Rachel Marsil’s original proposal for an exhibition at Casa Wabi was entitled J'entends l'orage (I Hear the Storm). Prompted by visions of the rainy season in Dakar, Senegal, Marsil intended to evoke the experience of weathering a storm: seeking shelter with friends and family, waiting for the “beautiful days to come back.” Rain is an experience most of us share, wherever we live. But the kind of thunderstorms that arrive in the afternoon like clockwork, turn the sky from blue to black in seconds, dump an unimaginable amount of water in minutes, and then vanish as if by magic, leaving only stultifying humidity and the smell of wet earth and cement under a blazing sun, are more specific to the tropics. The opportunity to link Mexico City with parts of the world that are not usually part of the local imaginary through the apprehension of a trans-national environmental culture was irresistibly Wabi.
As Marsil thought about the tropics as a global community that could be activated through a common deep empirical experience she became more interested in specific experiences of rain. How torrential rain fosters intimacy and community by forcing us to hunker down together. How the rhythm of life in this band around the equator is reformatted by daily downpours. As she thought about it, she became enamored by notions of cocooning and renewal that knit together our experience of the environment and daily life. Remembering something she heard from a waitress while doing a residency in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, and drawing as always on family photos, Marsil began a new series of paintings, and J'entends l'orage (I Hear the Storm) became Le poisson vient avec la pluie (Fish Come with the Rain), a more elliptical and symbolic take on her roots. During the rainy season, she was told, fish are said to rain down from the sky. But there—unlike the English “raining cats and dogs," Spanish “lloviendo a cántaros (raining buckets),” or French “pleut des cordes (raining ropes)”—it is not a figure of speech. Well it is, but it’s a metaphorical description of a biological reality.
Throughout parts of West Africa with strong dry and rainy seasons, the lungfish (protopterus annectens), a big eel-like fish, appears with the first heavy rains of summer on otherwise dry ground, as if having fallen from the sky. In fact it is an extraordinary hibernator that survives the dry season underground. When the rivers and streams, ponds and lakes dry up in the late fall, lungfish burrow deep into a muddy bed, fold themselves in half, excrete a mucus that hardens into a complete shell-like cocoon, and wait for the rains to return. When enough water falls, they perform the magic act of emerging, full-grown, from the earth. And when enough water accumulates to again form lakes and streams, they return to swimming, eating, and spawning: the regular life of a fresh-water fish.
Its adaptability and resilience seem worth noting in this climate we've made. In Brazil they say
“Quem não se molha, não atravessa a chuva,” meaning roughly, “you can't get through the rain without getting wet.”
— Dakin Hart
Curator
