Ariela Kader

Lives and works in Barcelona, Spain

Artist statement

Ariela Kader (San José, Costa Rica, 1991) is an artist, educator and socio-environmental activist. For more than a decade, Kader has been creating works on and from plastic waste and plastic bags. Starting with her interest in trash bags on the streets of New York: where she interpreted the different compositions as social situations, illustrating the idea that "we are more what we throw away than what we consume"; then she collected plastic bags from different countries that she visited around the world and created "Plastic Portraits", collages through which she not only portrayed specific places and times but also her experience in each one of them. At the beginning of the pandemic, Kader returned to San José, Costa Rica where she began to clean various beaches and discovered a new material: plastic waste, from which she began to create sculptural assemblages. "If trash is everyone's problem, it is also everyone's resource." This past Summer, Kader participated in an art residency at RARO Barcelona where for the first time she worked with these "two worlds" (streets and beaches) simultaneously and created works from the waste collected in both places. As a crucial aspect of her artistic career, Kader has also taught and continues to teach her "Trash2Art" workshops where she teaches different communities around the world how to transform their waste into works of art, giving a new life to these materials: far away from the garbage dump, the floor and the oceans. Kader...

Artwork