The German-Ecuadorian artist Simon Speiser presents an exhibition in Guayaquil for the first time: “The memories of my father’s farm in Esmeraldas created an imaginary forest in my head”

A series of works inspired by stories about myths, oral traditions and folklore of cocoa farms in Esmeraldas, compiled through conversations with the local people of the region. will be exhibited in The vision of the mountainthe exhibition of the German-Ecuadorian artist Simon Speiserwhich was inaugurated last Saturday, August 19 in the Casa del Barrio gallery, located on Panama and Juan Montalvo streets.

The exhibition consists of pencil drawings, photographs and a mechatronic sculpture simulating light in a tropical forest. Speiser set up this space together with the Eacheve Foundationpromoting Ecuadorian art, has 11 pieceswhich -according to the artist- will continue to grow in the years to come, as there are “many more stories to be told about the ghosts of the emerald jungle”.

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In an interview with Diario THE UNIVERSESpeiser talked about his life as an artist and about the show.

He was born in Regensburg, but grew up between Germany, Ecuador and Bolivia. He received all his professional training in his native country. “I first studied at an art school in Stuttgart, in the south of Germany, and then graduated from the Städelschule in Frankfurt, a small but international art school. Studying art in Germany is very special, because it gives students a lot of space and freedom without many rules and structures. That can be difficult, so you have to act very independently, but at the same time it reflects a lot on what it means to be an artist,” says the 35-year-old sculptor.

How did you get started in the world of visual arts?

Well, that’s a pretty broad question that doesn’t have a definitive answer. I would say that a good start is an obsession. You have to find something that you want to devote yourself to with an obsessive passion; It can be a theme, a technique, a medium, a material or whatever. For me, that is the relationship between nature and technology, involving my own search for identity as a German-Ecuadorian artist. In addition, art is a very social world for which exchange and networking between artists, curators and collectors is essential.

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He grew up in a mix of cultures: German, Bolivian and Ecuadorian. How have they influenced your art?

The Latino connection has been a major influence on my work, especially in relation to my father’s cocoa farm in Esmeraldas. It has always been very important to him to preserve the wild nature and that purity was etched in my memory. Growing up in Germany for most of my life, those farm memories created an imaginary forest in my head that I take with me everywhere and provides fertile ground for my work.

At the same time, I am also very influenced by science fiction and new technologies. It fascinates me how projection into the future, through fiction, paves the way to where we are going as a society. That’s why I think there’s a great need to tell sci-fi stories that don’t take us away from our past and don’t paint dystopian worlds, but rather paint a positive future.

What themes are you dealing with in this exhibition?

The vision of the mountain tells stories of encounters with spirits in the emerald jungle. They are stories that have happened to relatives, friends and people from the countryside. I’m very interested in the relationships cultivated with these spirits and how they fit in Esmeraldas between Catholicism and the Afro worldview. The stories are told through a light sculpture that projects shadow plays in space. The light is controlled by a robotic arm that is synchronized with my father’s voice, who tells four stories that I wrote based on interviews I did with him and with the help of a friend in different towns in the province of Esmeraldas and myself. wants to delve into the play of shadows in sculpture.

The origin of the name “La Visión del Monte”

For the artist, the word “vision” is very typical for Esmeraldas to speak of the supernatural. “It came out of an interview I did with a boy from the town of La Mina, where my father lives, in Mutile. He told me a story that happened to his father and ended the story with “…well, those are the visions of the mountain that usually pass here.” At that moment I knew that this had to be the title of the work.” Speiser confesses.

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This exhibition, which is on view until next Thursday, September 7, represents a milestone in his artistic career and is the first individual exhibition he is holding in the city of Guayaquil. and the second in the country, as he presented the virtual reality work in 2019 In a young world of dazzling brillianceinvolving 3D scans in Esmeraldas and in the Amazon region of Ecuador and Brazil, at the Contemporary Art Center in Quito. (JO)

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