Maria Escudero - Astro


Work        

Maria Escudero - Astro

The feminine body has been disappeared by colonial structures. As the echoes of our past still linger in our contemporary life, I consider it necessary to materialize these omissions. To reconfigure our past, I fuse a range of media, including frottage, casting, weaving, metalworking, collage, performance, and photography.

My process oscillates between tuning in to sensuous, visceral, lo-fi gestures and creating polished and cerebral structures. An impulse, a moment of stunning lucidity arrives, asking me to rub coffee on bedsheets. I don’t resist; I follow. In a coffee frottage, understanding becomes vibration stemming from my fingertips. A simple gesture, shot from the hip, is laden with information; it may take me years to intellectually digest, refine and exhaust. From the exchange between explosive emotions and slower intellectual energies, tactile images and multi-sensory installations emerge.

To summon the past, I incorporate agricultural staples, bodily ephemera and quotidian objects. As metaphors, my materials speak of personal narratives in Ecuador. Coffee, hair, wool, panela, bedsheets, and snow surface the intimate stories of the people that have touched them. Coming from personal encounters, negotiations and exchanges with others, I develop a corporeal and affect-based relationship with my objects. There is nothing more tender than asking for another’s bedsheets.