Lina Bravo Mora

I am Lina Bravo Mora from Bogotá, Colombia. Now I am based in the Netherlands. My work is intersectional and finds itself between the arts, social sciences, and education. I primarily work with ceramic sculpture, video, installation, and storytelling. At the moment, I am writing and researching for a cultural opinion podcast called ExtravagantMortals. I studied a B.S in Anthropology and a Med in Arts in Education. My artistic research is about memory construction from ecological perspectives. To do so, I bring “nature” into intimacy and place personal creations back into “nature.” I want to question the binary opposition between nature and culture. In my practice, my motivations and media are mutually influenced. On one side, clay is a territorial material; its features vary depending on its origin and weather conditions. One can understand the landscape from a piece of clay. One can have a sense of geological processes by experimenting with the chemical transformation of clay into ceramics. On the other side, I work within a logic of mutual connections between the macro and the micro, the territorial and molecular, the collective and personal. I am inspired mainly by my body experience as a woman, my work with other people (especially kids), natural forces, plants, and territories. I sculpt by doing delicate dissections of shape and collect gestures to construct metaphors and stories around memory. I search for the elegance and cleanness of clay and, through it, create sorts of cabinets of curiosities with morbid anatomies and petrified emotions. In my work, there is frequently a playful winking to western scientific disciplines and practices, like archaeology, botany, and cartography. My purpose is to question them by working across art and science boundaries from a decolonial and feminist perspective.