Focus On Puerto Rico : Elizabeth Robles

Artist Elizabeth Robles (b.1960, Puerto Rico)
 practices across media, fusing sculpture, drawings, objects, "ecofacta", and residues of performances on installations. 

The relationship with her surroundings informs her work, which explores connections and coexistence between objects found or created, materialities, architecture and the urban and rural fabric.

PROJECT 

While participating in Focus On Puerto Rico, Robles will design and build a transmedia installation resulting from her walking practice between the two "residences". Lines, marks, and footprints she has been collecting by tracing and engraving sidewalks and walls during her walks in the neighborhood where she resides in Hato Rey, will be combined with others, also chosen at random, from the places she traverses during her residency in Miami.

Viewing the act of walking as an act of resistance, Robles collects marks as graphic residues and fragments. Walking becomes an action in which the possibility of building a space of one's own, and inhabiting through interaction with the city is inscribed.

This out-of-doors experience will result in a work that connects the performance, the durational collecting of sidewalk marks, with the “drawn” as object, transforming the action into a new configuration.

The final piece will emerge as a cartography generated from the act and the experience of walking as an event of metamorphosis, as a shamanic ritual of displacement animated by the ways of relating to others as well as stones, plants, objects and other matters encountered. Her experience will be registered on diverse fabrics and papers: incisions, scratches, and fissures will make surfaces that generate something new. She will build a manifold installation of drawing-sculptures, objects, engravings, photography, and writing; bringing forth a practice of decolonization.