Natalia Sorzano

I create macabre and fantasy worlds where desire, identity and violence entangle. They emerge in conversation with people, matter, and landscape, each treated as collaborator. From this dialogue, I collect symbols and translate them into sound, sculpture, painting, and performance-to-video, folded together into immersive installations. Like speculative theme parks, these environments are joyful and camp, hand-built and abundant, inviting the audience into sensory excess. They give form to our collective imagination, blurring individual narratives and categories: bodies, substances, landscape, waste, indistinguishable.

The work begins with field visits, interviews and workshops, where we think through archetypes of horror, embodying and projecting our desires onto fictional worlds and situations. I draw from theory, history and myth: the cannibal savage, the alligator man, the mad woman, monsters — figures shaped by violence, exclusion, ecological anxiety. This research becomes material in the studio: collection and assemblage, field recordings, layered voice, scenarios turned into video and performance — sticking, collaging, building texture and tactility. I appropriate whatever is at hand — waste, found objects, pop-culture imagery, organic remains, textile, paper clay, paint — cross-contaminated, one material eating into the next.

I follow horror as method because it diagnoses what gets called desirable, what becomes repressed, punishable, eradicated. In horror and fantasy we surrender to our own materiality, no longer only subject, just a thing amongst things. Desire stops making sense. What dominant systems exclude begins to surface: new myths, identities, landscapes, alliances, pleasures. I extend this through long-term collaboration with LGBTIQ+ activists and communities, reclaiming what's been deemed abject, deviant, unnatural. Voices tangle. Matter asserts its own agency. Desire re-orients, inviting us, and the audience, to become something different.