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Estrid Lutz
Zonamaco 2024 -
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Estrid Lutz is a French artist born 1989 living and working in Puerto Escondido, Mexico. Crashes, the ocean, and advanced technological materials were the founding interests which lead her to study at École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris, and then in Art Center College of Design Los Angeles, CA, USA, before graduating with honours in 2016. Lutz’s earliest artistic works could be seen as violent explorations of the surfaces where human interaction with non-human occurs, and effect takes place. All artworks embody her reoccurring interest in the concepts of the natural and the technological, often finding emotional or empathetic connections as well as physical touch-points between the two. Since 2018, Lutz has lived and worked in Puerto Escondido, Oaxaca, Mexico where she found the perfect environment to develop her work in by observing the rough natural environment of Zicatela, one of the most dangerous surf beaches in the world. -
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NATURAL MEETS SCIENTIFIC
As an artist, Lutz is preoccupied with those poetic zones of contact where science or new technologies take their inspiration from organic processes or otherwise enter into a new relationship with the natural world. Her work engages in a speculative aesthetics that allows us to imagine a cosmos where such processes might run their course freely. A world, that is, where the distinction between the natural and the scientific has become irrelevant; a world in which the biomorphic entities we call humans are folded back into the giant pool of nature-technology. To achieve this effect, Lutz works with materials that are developed for high-tech purposes and that take their inspiration from organic processes. -
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During the pandemic, Lutz witnessed Puerto Escondido become a place for the non-human again. Turtles and crocodiles came back in abundance, hundreds covered the sand that for decades has been a place dominated by towels, sun-blocked bodies, and plastic toys in varied shapes and sizes. Estrid Lutz questions the empathetic relationship, gratitude, and respect for the non-human that we have the capacity for while embracing our fantastical drive for technological advancement. She acknowledges wholeness or inclusion inherent to our deep interconnectedness while not ‘returning to nature’, rather including it in progressive, expansive development.
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ORGANIC MEETS CRAFTED
Lutz creates a technopoetic synthesis of organic and crafted materials that is both poetical and critical. It is critical, in the sense that it is a way for Lutz to reconceptualize creativity in a world in which technology and the organic have merged with one another. It is poetic, in the sense that Lutz’s reconceptualization works with distinct formal and textural techniques that speak to our visual imagination. For unique textural effects and to intensify this poetic trajectory, Lutz induces chemical reactions by injecting water or air in her works or by burning parts of the work.
Estrid Lutz - at Zonamaco 2024
Past viewing_room
