My name is Samuel Sarmiento. I am a visual artist living in Aruba. My artistic practice investigates the narrative and hermeneutic capacity of contemporary drawing, its connection with Caribbean oral traditions, and learning mechanisms based on orality. I am also interested in ceramics as a tool for constructing allegorical objects and semiotic devices, erecting images related to historical processes, extractivism, identity, reproducibility, migration, and mimesis. Currently, I am using ceramics as expressive media for elaborating allegories and scenarios related to the birth and spread of food production. I am using art to reinterpret historical collisions and events such as nomadism, mobility, and the search for raw materials from Eden to the present day. I am interested in the animist and ritualistic character in the elaboration of everyday objects, using stories and symbols of oral traditions of the Caribbean as a starting point.
In both my drawings and ceramics, I use references, metaphors, and permeable tropes that are linked to archetypes, such as the effort to obtain food (Proteins and fierce people), paths of servitude (individualism and collectivism in the era of extraction) and social classifications (Cannibals, kings, and pristine states). Since 2019, I’ve been focusing on the expressive and narrative possibilities of ceramics, a medium capable of communicating contemporary discourses through different techniques but maintaining a heritage that can easily be associated with artisanal crafts that evoke a reconnection with the earth in an era of digital media. I have participated in artistic residencies such as EKWC – European Ceramic Workcentre (Oysterwijk, NL), Van Gogh AIR Foundation (Zundert, NL), The Bakehouse Art Complex Residency Program (Miami,USA), Watershed Center for the Ceramic Arts Residency Program (Maine, USA), Caribbean Linked VI – Ateliers 89 (Oranjestad, Aruba), Red Lodge Clay Center Residency Program (Montana, USA) and BijlmAIR artist-inresidence program organized by CBK Zuidoost (Amsterdam, NL) with the support of Bradwolff Projects and Stedelijk Museum.
In 2022, I had the opportunity to have a time of creation in Yaddo Residency (Saratoga Springs – NY, USA), a
space with a long history and tradition that has had among its attendees artists such as Clyfford Still, Truman Capote, Philip Guston, Helen Frankenthaler and David Foster Wallace, among others. I have also exhibited my work in group exhibitions such as 30 jaar Bijlmervliegramp at Amsterdam Museum (Amsterdam, NL), A world of many words at CBK Zuidoost (Amsterdam, NL), Mykonos Biennale (Mykonos, Greece), Resisting: Form and Surface at Red Lodge Clay Center (Montana, USA), ARCO Lisboa (Lisbon, Portugal), ZONAMACO (Mexico city, Mexico), We are looking to shake at Uniarte Foundation (Willemstad, Curacao), Pioniers in keramiek at Prinsenhof Museum (Delft, NL) and Extractivism and its discontents organized by MasArteMasaccion Collective in the framework of Documenta 15 (Kassel, Germany), among others.
