MARIA HOYOS. MEMORIAS DE AZÚCAR

The public is invited to discover Memorias de Azùcar, an exhibition by Maria Hoyos, a student graduating from the Master’s in Visual and Media Arts (MFA) at UQAM. The artist offers an exploration of the symbolic charge of sugar cultivation, revealing how it has been nurturing ideologies of power in colonial and modern history, in addition to contributing to the establishment of capitalism in Latin America.

The Exhibition

In Memorias de Azúcar, Maria Hoyos draws from a decolonial perspective to investigate political, cultural and historical issues related to the agricultural production of sugar. Throughout this process, she reflects on her own identity and experience, both imbued in cultural diversity and interculturality. Used as a symbol of coloniality, sugar bears witness to the systems of domination that persist after the independence of many colonized countries. With the creation of an installation inspired by the antimonumento movement in Latin America – a series of gestures in response to the abusive acts of the state and criminal groups against civil society – Maria Hoyos invites us to transform our relationship with the capitalist model, in a way that subverts its hegemony. Thus, Memorias de Azúcar becomes a space for questioning and consecrating.

The exhibition is an installation that consists of multiple elements: sculptures, video, writings in sugar, sugar cube constructions, site-specific interventions, soil, and sound. Among these components are Cañaduzal en duelo (2021-2022), a series of cane casts paying tribute to five Afro-descendant children killed in 2020 in the neighborhood of Llano verde in Cali; an antimonumento (2022) designed with 150 words written in sugar on the walls of the gallery; Nefropatìa azucarera (2020-2021), a video of a sugar animation denouncing a disease that affects thousands of underprivileged workers, and lastly, a ritual space created as part of the artist’s interventions in the gallery.

The Artist

Maria Hoyos is a Colombian artist from Santiago de Cali. She lives in Abya-Yala on the unceded indigenous territory of Tiohtiá:ke/Montréal. In the Kuna language, Abya-Yala means maturing, living, flourishing, and bleeding land. Deeply attached to her city of birth, she has been interested in the moving image since the beginning of her career, which she explored during her studies in Bogota in Colombia, Madrid in Spain, and Havana in Cuba. She discovered the medium of installation and her passion for working with a variety of materials while studying at Bellas Artes in Cali in Colombia. She immigrated to Québec in 2002 and, since then, continued her studies in arts and art education at UQAM. She recently graduated from the Master’s in Visual and Media Arts (MFA) at UQAM.