IASPIS dialogues: Valeria Montti Colque and Rossana Mercado-Rojas
Welcome to this conversation between artists Valeria Montti Colque and Rossana Mercado-Rojas. Situated at Valeria’s IASPIS studio they speak about their artistic work, approaches, methods and material, finding common ground and points of departure that touches upon memory, relations, and identity.
Valeria Montti Colque is a Stockholm based artist. In her practice she builds worlds of imagery inspired by everyday life, along with myths, religions, society, heritage and popular culture. Her works, often developed as collaborative processes, feature symbols and metaphors and mixes media, materials and styles, including drawing, painting and performance. Valeria studied at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm in 1998–2004 and has participated in numerous international and national exhibitions, performances and public art projects. Between April 1 and September 30, 2020 she was an IASPIS grantholder. During her residency she explored different collage tekniques and expanded on her works Molnskogen, Horisontens Fåglar and Det Svarta Vilda Molnet (Cloud Forest, Birds of the Horizon and The Black, Wild Cloud).
Rossana Mercado-Rojas is an artist, curator and community organizer of Andean descent based in Stockholm. Her practice explores decolonial feminist practices, public spaces, and collective work. She has been working mainly with ephemeral interventions of spaces with sound, mural painting, video, text, and spoken word performances in order to generate common spaces, habitats-on-the-go, and reclaim the right/feel entitled to exist and inhabit the place where we are. Rossana’s work aims to voice her/our personal journey across different legal and social structures as a way to enunciate what is usually ignored or bluntly erased. Rossana is one of the founders of La Dekoloniala! (Sweden) an artistic, and cultural organization that strives to bring forward decolonial knowledge from the global South. She is one of the initiators of the feminist collective Hysterix (Peru) focusing on multidisciplinary interventions in the public realm.