ANGÉLICA ALOMOTO
Angélica Alomoto( b. 1978, Quito, Ecuador), a Kichwa-descended artist from Napo, Ecuador, works between the Amazon, where her family and cultural roots lie, and the Andes, where she currently resides. Her background in fine arts and visual anthropology allows her to ground her practice in conceptual rigor, ritualistic practices, and historical research. Alomoto has returned to the archival illustration that is the basis of the installation Cuatro caminos( Four paths)( 2024) in more than four works, unraveling a thread of colonial legacy that embraces intergenerational trauma, storytelling as emancipation, the impact of urbanization on community memory, extractive economies, and the fractured yet enduring multispecies relationships of the Amazon.“ I first saw this image when I was about eight, in a history book,” she recalls.“ Since then, I’ ve been searching for that place in the forest— returning to the image to understand why it remains so deeply rooted in me.”
In Cuatro caminos, Alomoto reworks the image through the material and symbolic use of rubber sap, stripping away its association with colonial violence to evoke the spirit of the forest. The trees, rendered as presences rather than objects, are framed by Omagua ancestral drawings above and below, symbolizing the spirit of forest.“ Together,” she states,“ they embrace the trees that continue to suffer during extraction.” In front of the canvas stands a mokawa, a ceramic vessel used in both everyday life and ritual, painted with the same motifs: illustrated forest on the inside, spirit of the forest on the outside. As Alomoto states,“ this mokawa holds water that, over time, will evaporate, becoming as intangible as the spirits of the desecrated forests.”( DIANA ITURRALDE)
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