Rosaura Amauta García Vázquez

Lives and works in Mexico and Netherlands

Artist statement

I am a visual artist and the desire to inhabit has been present in my practice for ten years, when I started working with stories of migrants who occupied a volcanic land in Mexico City to build their houses, like my mother. Since then, I use elements of architecture, sculpture, public interventions, video, and virtual environments as tools to understand these housing desires and tell stories that are, at the same time personal, social, and political. In my sculptures I wonder how long it takes to acquire a home in the context of a real estate bubble. Therefore, I represent the percentage of an apartment that I could buy within 20 years of my life; the time it would take me to pay off a mortgage. Some of these sculptures are in-site interventions that replicate the design and materials of the original apartments and are located in neighborhoods whose real estate boom displaces all the people who cannot afford it. I also do performances altering virtual worlds generated by architectural and video game rendering engines not only to understand the similarity between renderings and desires, but also to try to make impossible dreams come true like returning to the womb. Studying the housing crisis led me to observe relationships between urban extractivism, migration, real estate speculation, and land exploitation. In this new stage I want to investigate how these elements are articulated and how building narratives that play with fictions and realities helps us generate empathy...

Artwork