Elisa Balmaceda 

Visual artist, educator, and transdisciplinary researcher. Her work explores the relationships between the material, the invisible, and the spiritual within the contemporary energetic and electromagnetic landscape. By intertwining diverse forms of knowledge and employing light, sound, video installation, and fieldwork, her practice investigates ecological phenomena that connect body, technology, and territory. These explorations shape our temporal, spatial, cosmological, and imaginary perceptions surrounding cycles and more-than-human forces.

She has participated in residencies such as Simulacros Interplanetarios by Terremoto (Sonora, 2024), Transmediale (Berlin, 2023), and Tsonami Arte Sonoro (Valparaíso, 2021), among others. Her work has been recognized with the KHM Award for Women Artists (Germany, 2017) and the Municipal Prize for Young Art (Chile, 2018). Recent exhibitions include FESTIVAL TRANSMEDIALE: A STORY, A MAP, A FICTION, Akademie der Künste (AdK), Berlin, Germany (2023); DEL CIELO AL AGUA Y LO QUE ESTÁ EN EL CENTRO, curated by Valentina Montero and Jocelyn Contreras, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, Santiago, Chile (2023); DEVORAR EL TRUENO, curated by Merlina Rañi, Espacio CaSo, Buenos Aires, Argentina; and ARS ELECTRONICA (Gardens): Polygonal Forest, curated by Fundación Mar Adentro (2022).

She works as a guest lecturer at various educational institutions and is the co-creator of the virtual platform and experimental laboratory visionaryecologies.xyz, an art and ecology project hosted by the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society (Germany). She is also a collaborator at the Latin American Arts and Technology Center Toda la teoría del Universo (Chile) and currently serves as a guest workshop facilitator for the Max Aub Chair of Art and Technology at UNAM (Mexico). In addition, she works as 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