Teodoro Monsalve

Lives and works in Quito, Ecuador

Artist statement

My practice examines how technologies, images, materials, and forms of knowledge migrate across time and geography. I approach artmaking as a system of collaboration between human and non-human agents, where ancestral technologies, biological processes, machines, archives, and speculative imaginaries coexist and transform one another. Working from the Neotropics, I bring materials and processes such as oil painting, printmaking, drawing, wood carving, handmade fiber paper, and copper into dialogue with artificial intelligence, digital fabrication, and 3D printing. I am interested not in technological progress as a linear succession in which one technology replaces another, but in the simultaneous presence of radically different ways of making and knowing. I understand this coexistence through the idea of technodiversity: a condition in which technology remains inseparable from territory, ecology, cultural memory, and particular ways of understanding the world. From this position, my work explores the possibility of a situated cosmotechnics emerging from the Neotropics. My projects often begin with research into archives, archaeological collections, scientific imagery, historical accounts, and material traces. Rather than treating these sources as fixed evidence of the past, I approach them as unstable territories that can be reassembled, translated, and transformed. Through speculative fabulation, fragments of history become starting points for images, objects, and...

Artwork