Christian Salablanca Díaz

Christian Salablanca Díaz was born in Costa Rica, in 1990, where he currenty lives and works. He holds a degree in Arts and Visual Communication from the National University of Costa Rica, with honours in Sculpture. His interdisciplinary practice encompasses installation, sculpture, drawing, performance, and moving image, and is rooted in personal memories, oral traditions, and encounters with stories and objects connected to ancestral knowledge. Salablanca’s artistic research examines the phenomena of violence and the ways in which violent systems produce, determine, and condition historical, social, and political subjects. His work considers territories and communities across Central and South America and the Caribbean, creating relationships between different forms of knowledge and between human and non-human life. His practice is concerned with the cultural relations generated by systems of violence, moving between the word and symbolic memory, the human and the animal, and centres of power and their peripheries. Orality occupies an important position within his work. Salablanca draws on personal memories and family traditions to construct stories and narratives connected to ancient and symbolic forms of knowledge. These processes often lead to installations, sculptures, drawings, and performances in which oral histories become a means of establishing connections between bodies, territories, and forms of inherited knowledge. More recently, his work has also explored relationships between nature and the body, plants and seeds, wind and birds. His practice frequently develops through research into specific places and communities. Rather than treating these contexts as simple subjects of representation, Salablanca approaches them through encounters, narratives, and processes of exchange. This methodology allows personal and collective memories to enter into dialogue with broader histories of political and social violence, while opening connections between ecological, cultural, and symbolic forms of knowledge. Salablanca has presented his work internationally in solo and group exhibitions. His solo exhibitions have included presentations at Museo de Arte y Diseño Contemporáneo in San José in 2014, FLORA ars+natura and Valenzuela Klenner in Bogotá in 2018, and Sagrada Mercancía in Santiago and Kiosko Galería in Bolivia in 2019. He has also participated in exhibitions and projects at institutions and spaces including Gasworks in London, TEOR/éTica in San José, Espacio Odeón in Bogotá, Museo de Arte Moderno de Medellín, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Panamá, Kunsthalle am Hamburger Platz in Berlin, and Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid. In 2021, Salablanca participated in *Unfinished Camp*, an international interdisciplinary project developed around the question of the future of art in a decentralised world. His contribution, *wī(ə)rləs* (2021), was presented as part of the project at Pivô in São Paulo. The project brought together artists whose practices addressed contemporary questions surrounding technology, knowledge, ecology, and collective forms of existence. Salablanca’s work continues to develop through the intersection of memory, oral tradition, territory, violence, and ecological relationships. By bringing ancestral narratives and contemporary social realities into contact, his interdisciplinary practice proposes forms of connection between human and non-human worlds and examines how knowledge, history, and identity are shaped through cultural and political relations.