Sandra de Berduccy
Sandra de Berduccy, known as Aruma, is a new media artist and weaver based in Cochabamba, Bolivia.
Aruma works with textile as technology, exploring the relationship nature, processes of traditional Andean weaving, and the languages of new media and electronics. She has carried out research on traditional textile techniques of the American continent, especially of Andean and pre-Columbian textiles, for nearly two decades. This work has lead her to understand the Andean loom as a thinking machine, with a logic that offers a very wide range of possibilities, a model of flexible order to which we are able to treat as collective memory.
As technology, Andean textile is constantly updated, invented and reinvented. With e-textile techniques such textiles can store energy, its colors -produced from natural dyes- can be stimulated by electric discharges, its fibers manage to conduct light and electricity, and therefore, become transmitters of information. The textile may also dispense with the visual, it can be decomposed into zeros and ones and be decoded in tablets or smartphones. By adding such devices, their designs can produce sound when they are touched or the beat of a heart can be visualized through them.
In each of Aruma's works, woven in Andean looms including various contemporary technologies, she proposes a form of continuity of the millennial textile culture that is currently developing in Andean lands, of which she considers herself a part.
Her works are in collections such as ESCALA Essex Collection of Art in Latin America, United Kingdom, PINTA - Contemporary Latin American Art. London and New York, the National Museum of Art in La Paz, Bolivia, among others.
Her work is also developed through workshops related to textile practices and technologies applied to contemporary art, and curatorial projects, including the General Curator of the VIII International Biennial of Bolivia, SiArt 2013 and, currently, Territorio Lupaqa: Art and Technology in the Native Forest, Qollpamayu - Cochabamba / Bolivia.
