Angélica Chio has lived and worked alternately in Berlin and Mexico City. She currently resides in Mexico City, where she was born in 1966. She studied Visual Arts at the National School of Painting, Sculpture, and Printmaking "La Esmeralda" in Mexico City, and pursued postgraduate studies in Art in Context at the University of the Arts Berlin. She has participated in numerous group exhibitions, video festivals, and national and international cooperative projects. She has been a recipient of grants from the National Fund for Culture and the Arts, Mexico, and in 2023 she received a grant for artists over 45 years old from the Kunststiftung K52 (Art Foundation K52) in Germany.
Investigating language and its possibilities of translation and transference, as well as proposing new alliances between word and image, constitute the compass and guiding thread of her artistic research. Rather than exploring a medium of expression, she focuses on concepts around an event and approaches it from different perspectives and strategies, creating independent and interconnected works, primarily drawings, objects, artist books, videos, and installations.
2022 From the series Por tierra, mar y aire (By Land, Sea and Air) 24 Clay tablets
"With the aid of memories I keep from the homes I have inhabited, I trace their floor plans and compile a database with information about the residences and their inhabitants. Some data I take directly from my memory, while others I reconstruct from experiences, circumstances, or comparisons between one home and another; there are also some gaps.
To shape this journey through my memory, I employ the technique of cuneiform writing on clay tablets, as used by the ancient Sumerian people. This technique involves making incisions with a stylus on a wet clay tablet held in the hand.
To transfer the information from the database to the tablets, I design certain graphic symbols and employ notation systems compatible with the technique (Freemason cipher and Roman, Mayan, and Cistercian numerals). In this way, I aim for each tablet to be recognized at a glance as an object, observed in detail as a painting, or read as a document; whether in an intuitive or reasoned manner, finding keys in the context formed by the tablets and in personal experiences as an inhabitant.
The artwork consists of 24 clay tablets of varying sizes, with the largest being approximately postcard-sized and the smallest akin to a credit card.