Arts Thread

Carolina Muñoz Awad
fine arts mfa

Parsons School of Design

Graduates: 2022

Specialisms: Art Performance / Installation/Sculpture / Architecture

My location: Santiago, Chile

carolina muñoz awad ArtsThread Profile
Parsons School of Design

Carolina Muñoz Awad

carolina muñoz awad ArtsThread Profile

First Name: Carolina

Last Name: Muñoz Awad

University / College: Parsons School of Design

Course / Program: fine arts mfa

Graduates: 2022

Specialisms: Art Performance / Installation/Sculpture / Architecture

My Location: Santiago, Chile

Website: Click To See Website

About

carolina muñoz awad completed a MFA in Fine Arts at Parsons School of Design (2023) and was based in New York City from January 2021 to June 2023. Born in 1993 in Santiago, Chile, she graduated from a bachelor and master’s in architecture from the Pontificia Universidad Católica in 2018. After architecture school, Carolina worked in a couple of architecture studios, and then as a researcher for her former university and The National Fund for Scientific and Technological Development of Chile. In 2019, she started experimenting with materials and performance, trying to respond to personal questions that architecture could not resolve for her: How do we use our body in space? What does it mean to use space? And how do we perceive human presence? Muñoz has exhibited her work in Santiago, Albany and New York City. She has attended the Arts Letters & Numbers Residency in upstate, NY. sandbags 3 (performance, 2022) was most recently included in PAUSA – RE(cover, set, start, create, emerge, boot, live) at Bronx River Art Center in Bronx, NY.

How do you move when there’s nothing left to hold?* It is not that there are no things left, but what does holding mean at all. Referring to bodies, human bodies—during a highly contagious pandemic—holding was put into question even more. I laid overcooked rice over my body, compost, cream cheese, construction tape, paper bags, artist tape in the form of a grid, plaster bands, fabric, and sand; as if I wanted something to make me feel held, contained. I could not hold other human bodies for a while, and others could not hold me either. Holding my body in various materials was a first intent to determine my own (physical) boundaries in space. A delineation, a volumization, a grid, a 3D model. Holding became not only something someone animate could provide for me and my body, or vice versa, but something space together with certain matter could potentially help with. I wonder, when does gravity win us over? And instead of climbing, we just want to hang. To feel our weight, to be limited and comforted by gravity. Hang the sandbags on your body, hang your body on the sandbags, hang your body on the grid, hang your doby on the drig, it all gets so mixed up. The size of the module responds to the measurements of my body: forty-two centimeters is my width. At the end of the day, it is my inventory, and for a while, only in my body I could trust. * Allusion to The Concept of Dust, or How do you look when there’s nothing left to move?, by Yvonne Rainer, MoMA, NY, 2015.