Martín Huamanchumo
1 September 2024 – 31 January 2025
Originally from Peru (1992). At the age of 15 he moved to Madrid with his family, where he began to get closer to the different cultural manifestations of the city, exploring them and marking the basis of his interest in the artistic process and humanities.
Later he moved to Portugal, where he awakened his affinity for ceramics, and decided to deepen his interest by attending the school of Ceramics Francisco Alcántara (Madrid), taking a two-year training course in Artistic Ceramics. Later, he did an Erasmus internship in Caldas da Rainha (Portugal) for 10 months.
There he would have contact with the ceramics industry, in which he would develop his professional activity, specialising in the production of plaster moulds. His vocation and interest in ceramics motivated him to participate in various training courses at CENCAL (Training Centre for the Ceramics Industry, Caldas da Rainha), thus obtaining a solid technical base.
In June 2024 he settled in Gijón, a place from where he intends to promote his profession as a ceramist, a trade he is eager to expand in its aspects of artisan, artist, researcher and teacher. With this context, he is discovering the Laboral Centro de Arte, where he has the opportunity to carry out an Artistic Residency, the result of which is shown in this exhibition.
Artist participating in the exhibition Terranautas. Notes for a new world map
Project in residence
Molde-Lugar: Cerámica de divergencia
Based on the anthropologist Marc Augé’s thesis on non-places, a parallel is established with the industrial ceramic process, where the mould would be the archetype of a non-place (a space of anonymity and lack of connection). In contrast, the ceramic objects that the mould produces would be archetypes of places (spaces that encourage the creation of identity), where relationships converge with symbolic charges that categorise them and place them in the socio-cultural framework as elements of transposition of the person who uses or possesses them.
Is it possible to make the mould a place, an objectual space that allows diversity, relationship and the creation of identity?
MOULD-PLACE: CERAMICS OF DIVERGENCE seeks to answer this question through a process of research and experimentation, discovering new ways of understanding the mould as a creative element of diversity and identity, by means of a process of transformation and alteration of its form and structure, thus defining new ways of production that can enrich contemporary ceramic creation.
