Bio

Sofia Echeverri is a Colombian artist whose work highlights the body as an archival site entangled with the personal, political, and cultural. She considers her body and experiences the biggest sources of ideas, giving her the opportunity of acknowledging the archiving of memory and trauma within, with the objective of healing personal and generational trauma. These recreations of memory transform into spaces, objects, textures, and abstractions filled with meaning and color. She often approaches topics such as embodiment, belonging, race, colonialism, femininity, generational and personal trauma. She completed her BFA with a painting emphasis at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, and her MA at the University of Iowa. She is currently a MFA candidate in the Painting and Drawing program at the University of Iowa.

Statement

My recent work comes from my experiences with my body as a mnemonic space, where sensorial experiences are recreated to assist the mind in the process of remembrance. I aim to explore my body as a place where everything that is intense, personal, and collective is explicitly embodied. Every artwork I am creating becomes an embodiment of myself as well as feelings and experiences that have created an intense response within my body. My work deals with entanglement, disentanglement and varied recreations of memory and trauma as a form of healing, acknowledging the way these are embodied within me and finding ways to work through them as I create my artworks.

This process has led me to consider my body an archival site as well as a site for recovery and re-enactment of memory, as well as a place of healing; my body becomes an entity entangled with the personal, the political and the cultural, capable of being shaped by its lived experiences, history, and cultural context. My body archive develops itself as inseparable from its biases and therefore its archived context, my body stores its own history, and it is dependent upon the particularities on which it was born, matured and developed. My body has been providing me with a mnemonic space, where every time I enter this space, my body irrevocably changes and I change along with it.