Last week on FEEDBACK FRIDAY, we had María-Elena Pombo of Fragmentario. Continuing on with our Earth Month series, María-Elena focused on using materials that are a byproduct of the food industry to prevent them going to landfill, but also as a strategy to promote non-extractivist and decolonial futures. Likewise, promoting using free materials and finally centering plants people have a connection with.
María-Elena Pombo was born in Caracas and lives in New York City since 2011. She works through open-ended research projects that are normally translated into installations, objects, sculptures, and videos.
Watch the recording below.
About María-Elena Pombo:
Artist Statement: “I work through open-ended research projects that seek to understand the past, question the present, and imagine possible futures. My work spans installation, object, sculpture, and video and is informed by history, science, mythology, and language.
My practice is centered around living organisms and non-organic matter holding historical and contemporary importance across different cultures and times. From avocado seeds, water, onion skins, plant starches, algae, and more. A strategy to provide tools to create a collective consciousness centered around forgotten perspectives. I often gather these materials through participatory actions, as a way to engage heterogeneous publics by involving them in this alternative world building.
Applying ancestral knowledge and scientific inquiry that draw inspiration from geological processes, I transform and re-contextualize these materials into conceptual propositions that reimagine them as alternatives to clay, plastic, glass, textile-dye, electricity, fuel for vehicles, etc.”
FEEDBACK FRIDAY
If you are not familiar with FEEDBACK FRIDAY, every week, we speak with dyers, artists, scientists and scholars about our favorite topic, natural dyeing and color. Curated by Amy DuFault, Botanical Colors’ Sustainability Director and presented by Botanical Colors’ Founder Kathy Hattori.