BIO+CONTACT


Hello!

I am aaaalf, from Guayaquil - Ecuador.

As an artist, designer, and educator, I intertwine industrial manufacturing techniques and speculative creation to challenge our understanding of how the world is constructed.

I come from a family of metalworkers and mechanics; a tradition of making tools that make tools and put together our world. This knowledge and these machines were instrumental in making ships, assembly lines, forges and so on; instruments that correspond to and enable a prevailing Western techno-scientific cosmology, and the voracious modern world system that accompanies it. This tactile knowledge can also be instrumental in the transition towards decolonisation, plurality and kinship—in the words of Colombian-American anthropologist Arturo Escobar, a pluriverse: a world where many worlds fit. Reclaiming this heritage, I craft objects, installations, or public interventions. My approach involves exploring potential futures through collaboration, critical pedagogical experiences and responses to established infrastructures. It is more of a reflective practice than a means to solve practical problems—an open and process-based endeavour.

My practice locates itself within the urgency to radically change our modes of production and relation to nature. I delve into the socio-material consequences of manufacturing and design, as well as more-than-human agency. Drawing from the notion of cosmotechnics, I approach technical knowledge not as neutral or universal, but as inseparable from particular ways of understanding and relating to the world. From this perspective, the knowledge and practices of metalworkers, machinists, and machinery operators can be reclaimed beyond the market-driven logics that have historically instrumentalised them. These groups, systematically marginalized, paradoxically play a pivotal role in transforming matter and shaping our world. This motivates me to articulate new and pre-existing languages, trigger discussions about the futures we desire, and question who is allowed to imagine them.

My goal is to foster enduring intimate connections among strangers, disrupting notions of a natural order. I aim to facilitate micropolitical dialogues that intertwine affection, identity, and future expectations, generating responses for artistic production and situated socio-material projects. I aspire to delve deeper into how the metalworking heritage interacts with more traditional art forms, exploring interspecies thinking and the history of art and design in Ecuador. With a focus on symbolic production, I aim to speculate on cosmotechnical possibilities that were displaced, interrupted, or never allowed to emerge.

I am a recipient of the V National Arts Award Nuevo Mariano Aguilera 2024 and Prince Claus Seed Award 2022. I hold an MA in Design Expanded Practice from Goldsmiths, University of London. I have been involved in interdisciplinary projects like Making Futures Bauhaus+ by Raumlabor and Universität der Künste Berlin, as well as BBC’s Radio Zero. My work has been exhibited in Mexico, Quito, Tampa, New York, Eindhoven, London, Guayaquil, and Berlin.