Elisa Balmaceda 

Visual artist, educator, and transdisciplinary researcher. Her work explores the interweaving of the biosphere and technosphere, linking material, energetic, and spiritual aspects that seek to deconstruct and reimagine the interrelations of the human and non-human in a world dominated by extractive-colonial conflicts. Her research delves into cosmic and planetary geometries and ecologies, with a special interest in connecting ancestral and modern technologies for the study of the cyclical.

She currently works as a tutor for the virtual laboratory "biocosmic oracles" at the Max Aub Chair of Art and Technology at UNAM (Mexico) and is a co-creator of the platform and seminar visionaryecologies.xyz, an art and ecology project hosted at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society (Germany), an interdisciplinary research center.

She is an associated collaborator of the collective Toda la teoría del Universo (Concepción, Chile), and the creative director of the art and science project at the Millennium Institute MIRO for research in light, optics, and quantum physics.

Elisa Balmaceda's works - symbolically resonant, radiant and pulsating objects - use the tools of technology and progress to explore, invert and question reality. In her open and experimental "cabinets of curiosity", science, alchemy, ancestral knowledge, ecology, and science fiction come together, thus unveiling what has been made invisible, as well as manifesting the limits of our perception. Moving along the indeterminate, unexpected and multiple allows for a transdisciplinary dialogue, which occurs in a liminal and porous space, a promiscuous and mestizo one, provoking a cross-pollination of ideas that gives rise to new knowledge and perspectives. Her creations decolonise univocal and universalising ideas about knowledge and temporalities: they take turns, they look backwards and backwards, to locate and sustain us from our own time and territories. They hack the heavy dream of modernity, honoring what we were willing to sacrifice, insisting on what repeats itself, what returns again and again: the sacred cycles of earth and nature.

Victoria Guzman