David Camargo

My practice seeks to conjure what is no longer present: lost objects, erased bodies, or materials too fragile to endure. I work with archives and traces not to preserve them but to reveal their instability and the disputes around their interpretation. These fragments hold memories—imposed, erased, or distorted—that still shape how we understand history and imagine the present.

I am drawn to the excess of meanings that cluster around images and objects. Instead of clarifying, this abundance often makes them unstable, like stories that resist closure. By engaging with such materials, I aim to expose the tensions, absences, and contradictions within cultural memory. The digital is key in this process: not only a tool for reconstruction but a space where what is absent can be reanimated, circulated, and transformed.

Recent projects reflect this approach. Macuahuitl (2025) revisits the only photograph of a pre-Hispanic weapon lost in a fire, reconstructing it digitally to question how memory is preserved or erased. Arrullo (2023), presented at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, explores volcanic landscapes and lullabies as forms of resistance, weaving geological time with human displacement. Clastique (2022) reactivated 19th-century papier-mâché anatomical models, showing how Western science fragments and classifies the body. In collaboration with Amauta García, I have created works addressing extraction and geology as living forces: from singing to a submarine volcano to floating a concrete sculpture that embodied the time of its own materials.

What drives me is not the creation of new objects but the reactivation of what already exists. Each project begins with a search that moves between intuition and research, allowing fragments to generate their own narratives. Rather than closing questions, my work opens them: How are histories told when their objects no longer exist? What worlds can images create when brought back in another time and place?