Elvira Santamaria

Elvira Santamaría Torres (Mexico City, 1967) Completed a Masters degree in Visual Arts at the University of Ulster, Northern Ireland. Her work focuses on public actions, process art, installation and performance art. She is currently based in both Northern Ireland and Mexico. Since 1994 she has presented her work in festivals, art centres, galleries, museums and public spaces in Mexico, Europe, North America, Asia and Latin America. Her most recent public projects include: Encounter with Reconciliation and Corpology of Performative Resilience: Process Art 2019, 2020. In 2013, was nominated for the Artraker, Award for Creativity in Art and Conflict in London. She has been a member of Black Market International since 2000. She has organised several events such as, recently, Humanism in process: Female Performance Artist at Work 1 & 2, 2019. She is currently a Member of the National System of Art Creators FONCA-Secretaria de Cultura.

“Performance art is a time-space-presence- based form of art and an existential practice of self-knowledge. Time, space and presence as a structural trinity of change and transformation; aesthetics and ethics at work. Its poetic postulates the reflexion and creation of identity through gestures, acts, actions and attitude, which is an endless learning process. My main concerns, in all of my practice, have been to underline the changeable, fragile and ephemeral aspects of life, and to point out fundamental aspects of human life; behaviour, ordinary acts, and consciousness-development through performance art”