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marianne hoffmeister castro 


  



My reseach poses a critical examination of the representation of nature and animality in our contemporary western world. I work primarily with drawing, video, installation, and text-based projects to bring attention to the ways that nature and nonhuman beings are represented in visual culture but also to the complex and contradictory ways we relate to them. I am interested in reframing the way we share and produce knowledge,  to open the door to alternative imaginaries and cultivate other possibilities for seeing and knowing. Through an analysis of the ways language and images shape our relationship with surrounding nature, I locate and question inherited narratives of instrumentalisation, consumption, objectification and colonial dominion operating in the representation of the natural world. I utilise humor, radical affects, irony, speculation and human-decentered perspectives to create lines of escape from the schemes of the predatory colonial western imagination that dominates the collective imagining of the natural world. By doing this, I engage with non-anthropocentric storytelling strategies to foster a space to reimagine new modes of relation and iconographies of empathy with nonhuman domains in times of existential and ecological crisis.

I hold a BFA from Pontificia Universidad Católica in Santiago, Chile (2014) and an MFA from Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, United States (2022). I have exhibited and screened my work in Chile, United States, Ecuador, Peru, Switzerland, Korea, and have participated in diverse international residency programs such as Cow House Studios, Ireland (2017); Northwestern Oklahoma State University, United States / Molten Capital, Chile, (2018); Bibliothek Andreas Züst, Switzerland (2018); Pimoa Cthulhu, First Tentacular Writing Residency at the Institute of Postnatural Studies, Madrid (2020) and Mother's Milk in Kansas, United States (2021). Currently I am the artist in residence at Núcleo de Lenguaje y Creación at Universidad de las Américas, Chile (2022 - 2023) and the St. Elmo Fellow at UT Austin and Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center (2022 - 2023).