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GENEALOGY
JULIAN LOPEZ FLOREZ
From suspicion to breathing: a conceptual cartography
2026 FORMS THAT BREATHE
A research project on form as organism: what remains when ritual disappears is not only stone, but a breathing structure. Drawing from pre-Columbian schematic systems (Triana, Grass, Ballestas Rincón), the work treats ancestral forms as generative logics rather than ornament—translating them into drawing, 3D modeling, animation, sculpture, print, and metaverse circulation. The project frames the blockchain inscription as a contemporary continuation of the ancestral mark: new supports for an old need to inscribe presence.
2025 TÓTEMS OF SWEAT
A theoretical and material investigation of sweat as an ontological category: not residue, but life-in-action—memory produced through labor, movement, climate, and displacement. The totem is approached as an accumulative system of energy and memory rather than decorative artifact. This project reframes the migrant body as a site where materiality becomes spiritual infrastructure.
2021 THE SICK FLOWER
Produced across the pandemic and the political combustion of New York, this series merges territory, post-truth, and embodied perception into one field. The camera becomes existential orientation; painting becomes internal resistance; clothing becomes a portable counter-archive when institutions close. The “flower” shifts from ornament to symptom—tracking systemic illness across capital, inequality, and mediated reality.
2017 PURE POSE
Developed during a residency in Málaga, this project uses humor and staged exchange to expose migration/tourism as codified roles—foreigner, immigrant, tourist—as costumes legible within capitalist desire and stereotype. Digital editing destabilizes national symbols (flags, colors), treating identity as a performative contract rather than essence.
2017 DES-ACELER-ACCIONES
A speculative work that uses documentary legibility to reveal the document’s internal fiction. Through minimally perceptible edits and an installation strategy that forces the viewer into reflection, the project proposes “deceleration” as an epistemic gesture: interrupting the consumption of evidence so the image stops confirming and starts destabilizing.
2016 KIUBY CAVE
A decisive shift from analyzing truth to modulating the body. Built as an immersive cave with binaural sound, frequency-based composition, and live vocal performance, Kiuby Cave proposes a secular healing dispositif: the work is not contemplated but inhabited. Image, sound, and color operate as physiological choreography—an expanded perception environment where care becomes form.
2015 LOVE AFFAIR
After an affective rupture, five images remain—impossible to delete, unbearable to keep intact. The project embeds textual confession into the image’s source code (hex editing), corrupting the photograph from within. Confession here is not therapeutic clarity but ontological sabotage: the memory-image loses its evidentiary power and becomes unstable matter.
2014 MININI
An ongoing research line built from found photographs: discarded images without names, owners, or recoverable biography. Rather than restoration, Minini inhabits deterioration as a creative force—water, humidity, heat, oxidation, re-revelation by decomposition—treating damage as an active present. The project examines what an image can still “contain” when nobody claims it.
2013 DERIVA
Not a formal exercise on landscape, but a critical inquiry into documentary truth built from institutional genealogies and media workflows. By rewriting images at the level of code, Deriva transforms glitch into an epistemic tool: the error becomes a way to expose how “legible” national imagery is produced, stabilized, and circulated as proof.
2011 COMMUNITY VIDEO CARTOGRAPHIES
Workshops where communities design scripts as maps, produce their own videos, and geolocate stories in a shared digital territory. The archive shifts from expert property to collective right: representation becomes a negotiated infrastructure rather than extraction.
2011 DOCUMENTARY ACTION OF A WORK
A real-time installation where spectators’ movement edits the projected image inside a mesh cube. The work refuses the final archive: it exists only as present-tense event. A documentary that rejects stabilization, ownership, and commodification.
2008 LA PLAZA DE MERCADO
A first laboratory on images as power. While the city replaces its central market with a progress narrative, the project builds a counter-archive of those excluded from official visibility—asking who is allowed to enter the city’s image-memory, and what violence is performed by “urban renewal” as visual erasure.
THREAD / THROUGH-LINE
From suspicion to breathing
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2008–2012: the document as awakening → counter-archive, narrative sovereignty
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2013–2016: truth breaks → glitch, confession, trance
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2017: the document becomes doubt → identity as performance, reality as version
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2019–2021: post-truth as lived atmosphere → image as survival
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2025–present: ontology of the mark → form as living, breathing intelligence
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