The mask workshop, led by Damián Ortega, will be held at Fundación Botín from 21 November to 2 December, 2022. This will be a dynamic space for improvisation, learning and collective reflection, where participants can share their own insights, skills and experiences. It will explore the construction of masks using everyday objects and the creation of stories, opening a conversation about shapes, materials, their relationships, narratives and contexts.
This workshop is in conjunction with the exhibition that Damián Ortega will be presenting at Centro Botín in Santander from 8 October, 2022, to 26 February, 2023, entitled Visión expandida (Expanded Vision). The collection brings together his suspended pieces, revealing the infinite number of elements that make up the world around us.
Damián Ortega (Mexico City, 1967)
Through inventiveness and humour, Damián Ortega deconstructs familiar objects and processes by altering their functions and transforming them into novel experiences and hypothetical scenarios. Ortega’s work plays with a scale that ranges from the molecular to the cosmic. He applies the concepts of physics to human interactions where chaos, accidents and instability produce a system of relations in constant flux. He explores the tension that surrounds every object, focusing on it, rearranging it, examining it and inverting its logic to reveal an infinite world within.
His explorations reveal the interdependence of diverse components, whether this takes place in a social system or in the complex workings of a machine. While his projects—envisioned first through drawings—take the form of sculptures, installations, performances, film and photography, for Ortega, the work of art is always an action: an event. His experiments exist in a space where possibility and the everyday converge to activate a new and transcendent way of looking at ordinary objects and mundane interactions.
One of Ortega’s major projects is Alias Editorial, which was launched in 2006 and seeks to publish essential and fundamental texts within contemporary art that have been discontinued or have not been translated into Spanish, as well as works written by the artists themselves or interviews with them. Thanks to its simple publishing style, Alias makes these texts affordable for the public.
