FLORENCIA FLANAGAN UY
Florencia lives and works in El Pinar, Canelones. She is a visual artist, educator, and yoga instructor. She trained as an artist with Nelson Ramos and studied Performance with Gustavo Blázquez (Cba). As an educator, she trained at Taller Malvín with Nená Badaró. She studied Philosophy with Annabel Teles and completed Yogic Studies at the Satyananda Yoga Academy in Colombia. She has represented Uruguay in various Biennales and has participated in more than sixty exhibitions in Uruguay and abroad, including notable shows like ‘Tejer el Manto’ at the National Museum of Visual Arts in Montevideo, and ‘Rompecabezas’ in Asunción, Paraguay. She has been awarded the Paul Cézanne Prize, the Municipal Salon award, and the Fefca Scholarship for training. Since 2018, she has been leading the Escuela Itinerante, an artistic education platform that moves across different contexts, integrating body awareness, artistic production, and the development of critical thinking.
THE ROOTS OF MY DREAMS
A site-specific piece created to intervene in one of the abandoned houses in Pueblo Garzón, features a network of suspended fuchsia wool under the ceiling. This acts as lines of flight that disarticulate the space, lifting the visitor’s gaze beyond the traditional scale. Hanging from the network are delicate vertical strips of lightweight and somewhat transparent Japanese paper. They serve as support for an enlarged digital image of a drawing from a small sketchbook merged with a photo of the native forest.
The installation almost entirely embraces the house, with the fragmentation of the image, the network, colors, shapes, and the escapes being essential elements both formally and poetically. Meanwhile, from a corner of the piece, a bamboo root teaches us about its rhizome.
Exploring my roots has been a constant in my practices – a theme for which I don’t have definitive answers. My ancestors lived through wars, upheavals, and an incessant search for grounding. Drawing daily in notebooks is my way of marinating my searches and processes over time – not so much to understand but to let things exist and germinate. Photographing the territories I traverse allows me to stay awake, observe, and learn from nature.
Playing with scale, fragmenting the image reminds me that there are no absolute truths; everything depends on the point of view. Making visible the structures that sustain the artwork and having them interact with the space enables me to integrate parts. And it honors those emotional structures that sustain us day by day, allowing us to regenerate roots and bear fruit.
I conclude with this Chinese proverb: “A bird does not sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a song.”
José Burlando collaborated with Florencia on this installation.