About

Indira Urrutia Zúñiga is a Chilean-born multidisciplinary artist whose practice explores grief, migration, memory, and social justice through material processes and community engagement. Her work is deeply shaped by her experiences as a migrant across different territories and by a four-and-a-half-year bicycle journey through the American continent, during which she developed an embodied, ethnographic research approach grounded in observation, exchange, and oral history.

Her practice can be understood through Rosi Braidotti’s notion of nomadic subjectivity: not a strictly geographical condition, but a position shaped by the confluence of cultural, geographic, and intellectual influences. In Urrutia’s work, this appears as a refusal to let materials, identities, or cultural forms remain fixed; they are continuously woven and reconfigured as she moves, and her own subjectivity emerges “along the way,” in what the road weaves.

Combining personal narrative with fieldwork, she involves communities through interviews, storytelling, and shared making processes. Her intensive, meditative methods give form to reflections on resilience, displacement, and human connection. Materials play a central role in her practice: she works with wire, cassette tapes, photography, and video, re-signifying ordinary objects. Weaving with cassette tapes evokes childhood memories and recorded messages that traveled across distances, transforming them into tactile traces of memory and loss. Metals such as copper and bronze, tied to Chile’s extractive history, are worked with textile techniques that challenge their industrial rigidity.

Public space and participation are fundamental to her work. Through installations, textiles, urban interventions, and audiovisual projects, she creates spaces for reflection and dialogue, linking past and present by activating traditional techniques in contemporary contexts. Her practice invites viewers to slow down, listen, and attend to the invisible threads that connect people, territories, and histories.

She has exhibited internationally in Spain, the United States, China, the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia, and has taken part in residencies and exhibitions such as Drap-Art (Barcelona, 2025), Expressiones AiR and Mystic Museum of Art (United States, 2025), the Masaha Residency Showcase at Misk Art Institute (Saudi Arabia, 2024), and the Ras Al Khaimah Fine Arts Festival (UAE, 2024). She has been the recipient of the Masaha Art Residency (Misk Art Institute, 2024), the Sheikh Saud Bin Saqr Al Qasimi Foundation residency (UAE, 2023–2024), and the First Prize of the National Photography Cycle in Chile (2012).