Victor Artiga Rodriguez
Victor Artiga Rodriguez (*1987 El Salvador) is an interdisciplinary artist exploring the convergence of poetry, the body and digital technologies. Through multimedia installations and performance, he explores new forms of narration that touch upon themes of decolonization, climate crisis and nostalgia. Often intertwining electronics with organic materials like clay/ceramics, his installation invites the bodies of performers and viewers to a communal critical reflection on our condition as a techno-consumer society.
He currently lives and works in Bremen, Germany. His works have been exhibited in El Salvador, Costa Rica, France, United States, Cuba, and Germany. He is also interested in continually engaging in artistic collaborations. In 2019 together with Icaro Lopez de Mesa and Pablo Somonte Ruano, they formed Tremendo Parche Latino, an artist collective challenging notions of exotisation for Latinamerican artists in Germany. Later, morphing into Tremenda Corporea, in collaboration with Rahel Jüngling and Carla Anacker, an interdisciplinary collective with interests in body practices, digital technologies and fabric arts.
From February 2020 until April 2022, together with Aria Farajnezhad, they curated the project space of Circa 106 (Center for International Research and Collaborative Art) in Bremen. An artist-run initiative which hosts lectures, exhibitions and residencies exploring the possibilities of collaboration in artistic practices.
https://artigavictor.com
Academics:
2018-2022 Master of Arts with focus in Digital Media
In addition, part of Freie Kunst Klasse from Bildhauerei und Installation - Prof. Wendelien van Oldenborgh (DAAD scholarship)
Hochschule für Künste Bremen, Deutschland
2015-2017 Bachelor of Fine Arts- Art Center College of Design
Pasadena, California USA
2013-2014 Diploma in Cultural Management,
Ministry of Culture of El Salvador, San Salvador
Working Experience
2022 - Current - Assistant Lecturer for Media Theory - Hochschule für Künste Bremen, Deutschland
2020-2022 - Cocurator project space Circa 106, Bremen Deutschland
https://circa106.info/index.html
2021-2022 - Teaching Assistant for Dr. Nicolas Novoa Artigas
Critical Aesthetics, Non-dualistic Knowledges
Artistic Residencies - Exhibitions
Nov 2022 - Jahresausstellung Bremen - Integrated Design and Digital Media graduation works
Oct 2022 - Artistic Residency Künstlerhäuser Worpswede - Stipendiat*innen der Zukunft
Aug 2022 - “Cartografias Liquidas” (Liquid Cartographies) - Artistic Residency and exhibition in El Salvador, artistic practices in connection with climate activism
https://lab.ccesv.org/cartografias-liquidas/
March-April-July 2022 - The Paradoxical Myth of the Crazed Jaguar and Nene del Solar
Performance - Schwankhalle Bremen, Festival Inact - Strasbourg, From the A - Bremen
April 2022 - Official selection and screening of film “Between Crevices” at Film Festival Bremen
Feb 2022 - Our Porous Limits II - Prof. Van Oldenborgh Klasse exhibition Dauerwelle, Bremen
2021 - Bodies of Resonance, performance work at Schwankhalle Bremen
2020/21 - Art Residency at the Schwankhalle Theater Bremen To develop a performance at the theater
Jan 2020 - Exhibition - Mythopoesis - Analysis of Bremen's identity as a city - At Sphere/Circa 106, Center for International Research and Collaborative Art. (Bremen)
Nov 2019 - Event Performance – Bailongo Anti-Exotic - together with Tremendo Parche Latino Bremen at the Kultur im Bunker (Bremen).
2019 - Exhibition Raw Data Material Narration - Tor 40 Bremen
2018 - Three month Artistic Residency at Glogauiar Berlin, DE
Sound Performance
First presented in Schwankhalle Bremen 2022
Techno-sonic performance, where Jaguar and Nene encounter to decipher the connections among raw materials, technology and the sun.
The Jaguar in Mesoamerican mythology is the protector of the jungle, light and darkness simultaneously. In this performance, a Cyborg-Jaguar embodies techno devices emitting the sorrows of a jungle in destruction. Nene del Solar is a designer of rhythmic machines, who questions the origin of the materials used in their fabrication, placing into a dialogue the ancestral knowledge of making drums with the digital-electronic.
Through colonial dynamics, the fabrication of electronics and industrial machinery has been historically linked to the exploitation of territories in the Global South. The project explores the close relations between the sun and the tropical area, as a concept defined by the incidence of the solar rays, an endangered area full of biodiversity and natural resources. Through body in movement, poetry and sound, Jaguar and Nene inquire the problematics around the ontological division in Western thought between the animal and the human, technology and nature.
Performance
Together with Carla Anacker, Icaro Lopez de Mesa, Rahel Jüngling - Tremenda Corporea
In the context of the festival “BZW Natur” in collaboration with the theater space Schwankhalle in Bremen. This took the form of a performance walk/field recording, where we invited the public to use twelve “resonators” in the vicinity of the theater space, at the lake called “Werdersee”. Participants were first welcomed by us, with a 20 minute performatic introduction where the “instructions” on how to use the ceramic techno body were given, as well as handed a “user's manual”, which contained a series of suggested scores and also a fabric meant for comfort. The audience then becomes the sonic performers which would go either in pairs or alone, to perform with the “Resonator” on the shore of the lake the scores we had suggested, as well as their own scores, for a period of 40minutes - 2 hours. The performers returned to the theater space, where we would once again welcome them and bring the resonator inside together, and place it in a sound installation where the field recordings of the twelve ceramic bodies resonate together.
An experiment with alternative ways of creating a poetic performance, using a wet sound suit with humidity sensors and changing my voice in real time. I read a poem by the Salvadoran writer Roque Dalton, who was a poet during the civil war in El Salvador in the 1970s and 1980s. Almost magically, Roque Dalton escaped from prison during an earthquake in which the adobe wall of his cell collapsed. I explore the connections between poetry, matter and the body.
Performed at Tor 40, Güterbahnhof Bremen