MEMORY AND DECOLONIAL PRACTICES THOUGH MAKING: A RECLAMATION OF MESTIZA IDENTITY
Valentina Figueroa
Through my work, I am reinvigorating and helping establish Indigenous voices within contemporary art dialogues through material exploration of both ancient and modern technologies of metalworking, land-based research, and textile making. My work emerges from a genealogy of metalsmiths and textile makers, and from a legacy of Pre-Columbian symbology. Every piece that I make speaks directly to the relationship I have to my ancestors, to my craft mentors, and to the techniques developed by them in the past. My work also speaks to the relationship I have to the living materials that come from the land.
I am able to walk as an Indigenous woman of Mestizo origin seeking to reconnect to my ancestral heritage. I am connecting to the land and its materials in intimate and observational ways, so they can inform and teach me how to work them.
Portraits of ancestors, 2023. Exhibition at Emily Carr University, July 2023.
Páramo offerings
https://vimeo.com/686489214
La Sierra, 2021-23
Legends of our territories
