Architecture, Scale, and Research

ArtEchive

You originally came from architecture. How did you find your way into sculpture?

Edgar Solórzano

I found my way into visual arts about 8–9 years ago, right after quitting my last architecture job. At first, I used to make more two-dimensional work about spatial experience and spatial memory, with a much closer reference to my architecture training. After that, I slowly transitioned into a more sculpture- and installation-based practice.

I consider that my architecture training still shapes my current practice a lot, especially in the way I do research. Architecture is a context-based practice, and in the same way, my projects start with lengthy research on materials and context. While doing the research, I then allow my focus to diverge in a whimsical and rhizomatic way, weaving parts of the research in non-linear ways, which I enjoy a lot.

Another part of my practice that I believe is shaped by my architecture training is the shift of scale. I enjoy zooming in and out from the macro to the micro while doing research, jumping from global considerations to intimate ones, and back again.

Personal Memory, Global Forces

ArtEchive

Memory is central to many of your works. How do you balance larger narratives with personal history?

Edgar Solórzano

I enjoy doing research and working around generational, global, and/or national narratives, but the only way for me to access their emotional effects is through personal or familiar experience. Sometimes I can better understand global dynamics through the lens of these experiences, and sometimes I can better understand familiar dynamics through the lens of historical global dynamics.

I consider this switching of lenses a very useful tool to avoid getting lost in abstract generalizations and to avoid excessive navel-gazing and self-reference.

Humor, Tension, and Manufactured Nostalgia

ArtEchive

There are often strong material and conceptual tensions in your work. How do you understand these tensions?

Edgar Solórzano

I think these kinds of tensions are present in our material and emotional reality all the time. How we are affected by things, and how we affect them in return, is never linear or one-dimensional. We can both desire and feel disgusted by something; we can both aspire to and reject something at the same time.

These states of murky or contradictory feelings aren’t necessarily a temporal in-betweenness, but sometimes they simply show a complex system of relationships that mirrors how complicated our reality and our relationship to it can be. Although not always in the open, I work a lot with humor, and mocking or laughing about these contradictions makes them much easier to accept.

ArtEchive

How did the infiltration of American culture into Mexico become a central line of thinking in your recent work?

Edgar Solórzano

I think I got attracted to this topic because of this exact complexity. While I was growing up, I was exposed to a massive amount of US American culture because of NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, signed in 1994. This exposure created both aspirations and aversions within my family and generation, and, in response, I felt both included and rejected by it as I grew up.

Therefore, I got interested in this topic unintentionally. While developing work for a solo show I had in Mexico City in 2024, I couldn’t remember what movies I used to watch in a grand aunt’s TV room with my siblings, but I was sure it was one of the classic Mexican Cinema Golden Age movies. After asking my brother, his response was, “Yeah sure, it was Terminator 2 and Independence Day.”

Realizing that I was glamorizing my own memories made me start questioning why I was doing it, but also why I felt such an emotional, warm attachment to these foreign movies. After I started doing research, I realized how much of this was manufactured, and I started getting interested in the forces behind it.

If feelings towards one's own and foreign commodities can be manufactured as part of geopolitical mechanics, either by global or national, or even local, forces, moral pressure is one of the most effective tools for adopting or rejecting imported values and roles. I don’t think I offer solutions to that. I enjoy thinking that my work mostly functions as a methodology that dissects my own experiences, and that methodology can be applied to other contexts.