Folklore and Syncretism: Imagining Other Presents

Drawing on ancestral knowledge, memory, and the transformation of cultural legacies, the artists Kenia Almaraz Murillo (POUSH artist) and Camila Rodríguez Triana (II&I artist), in conversation with the curator María Wills Londoño, explore questions of origin, folklore, syncretism, and the pain of childhood exile, as well as considering how Latin American cultures have been dismissed as mere tradition, and how we can imagine another present moment.

Speakers

Camila Rodríguez Triana is a visual artist and filmmaker whose distinctions include the Best Art Installation Award at Panorama 21, Le Fresnoy (France), and the Emerging Artist Award at the Rencontres Artistiques, Carré sur Seine (France). She was selected as Carrie Mae Weems’s mentee for the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative (2020–2022). Her work has been presented internationally at institutions and venues such as the National Museum of Contemporary Art (Greece), the Salon de Montrouge (France), and BAM Fisher, New York (USA), among others. Her films have been screened at major international festivals, including the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, Doclisboa, and FIDMarseille. Camila is a Fellow this year at the Columbia Institute for Ideas and Imagination.

Born in Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia in 1994, Kenia Almaraz Murillo creates contemporary wall-mounted sculptures that skilfully explore themes such as familial legacy, diasporic identity and Andean cosmovision. Kenia’s complex works, hand woven in her Paris studio, integrate weavings in indigenous South American yarns with urban objects such as car bumpers and motorbike headlamps salvaged from Parisian scrapyards. Illuminated by LED lights, recent pieces incorporate embroidered panels of bolivian traditional costumes as well as ritual items like small bags of corn, quinoa and protective amulets, in a seamless fusion of the natural and artificial.

Kenia Almaraz Murillo is represented by Waddington Cusot, London and Dubai.

María Wills Londoño is a curator and art historian whose practice explores the instability of the contemporary image, and the re-examination of historical narratives in art. Her recent curatorial work has focused on art, well-being, the concept of pleasure, and collective experience, including the 2025 Bogotá Biennial Essays on Happiness, which she co-curated, and Wametisé: Proposals for an Amazofuturism, presented at ARCOmadrid 2025.

Hosted by MIRA art fair, and organized in collaboration with POUSH, and The Columbia Institute for Ideas and Imagination.