FRANCISCO GUEVARA

Designer biography:

Francisco Guevara is a visual artist, independent scholar, and founder of Arquetopia Foundation and International Artist Residencies based in Mexico, Peru and Italy. His experience spans more than 20 years of international artistic projects, curating and teaching, as well as multiple collective and solo exhibitions. He specializes in Levinasian ethics applied to the design of cross-cultural artistic projects, and the analysis of historiography and performativity in contemporary art practices. As a visual artist, Guevara investigates the historical construction of the differentiation processes, embodiment, and the concept of distortion through a wide range of artistic/historical mediums, including painting, installation, metalsmith, textiles, fashion and jewellery design.

Collection concept:

“Looking In the Mirror” is a series of obsidian and silver mirrors encrusted with precious gemstones, exploring different manifestations of ‘Empire’ as a superstitious fantasy of destruction and extermination. Thinking about the black mirror as an “inversive” medium and inspired both by the obsidian mirrors from the British Museum, and the descriptions from the codexes Yanhuitlan and Kingsborough, this series links Cartesian philosophy to the practices of knowledge destruction and looting, to produce divine imperial illusions. From the so-called “conquest” of the Americas, to the birth and expansion of the British Empire, including the ransacking practices of the Grand Tour and the creation of museums, mirrors have been present as a technology throughout the history of power.

Francisco Guevara (Mexico)

FRANCISCO GUEVARA

Designer biography: