Maflo Martinez

Argentina, resident 2022

Maflo Martínez is an Afro-descendant visual artist, portraitist and professor of Visual Arts graduated from the Antonio Ruiz de Montoya Higher Institute (2018). She develops in visual, pictorial, sculptural and video art production. In addition, she exercises her profession by giving workshops, seminars and providing spaces for the production of works.

The memory of thorns

Maflo has been working for five years under three clear aesthetic and productive lines, where vulnerability is the entity that unites them, and vulnerability is also its starting line.

These are:

1. The notion of the process as artistic production, the sketch and the concept before the idea.
2. A line of artistic work that seeks to reinforce his most impulsive and projective side.
3. Finally, the union of both.

During her stay at the residency, she found protective barriers in nature such as the thorns of the Palo Borracho tree. For this reason, she made The Memory of My Thorns, a living sculpture made with an iron and wire structure covered with ñaú mud. With this work, the artist seeks the active participation of the viewer, since she must go through the work to be able to see that inside it there are phrases such as: what do you expect from your thorns, when did you feel abandoned, among others. She seeks to invite you to think about your own traumatic experiences and in an act of collective healing, take the positive from those aspects that made us vulnerable and make them act as thorns-memories of protection.

Text: Irene Gelfman