Biography
Cristina Collao (Koyao) Chile - Germany
Cristina
Collao is a visual Artist, Stage Designer, Theatre Director and
Illustrator.
She was born in Santiago, Chile, and lives since 2011
in Germany.
She studied Design at the School of Design of the
Pontifical Catholic University of Chile and Arts and Theater at the
Faculty of Arts of the University of Chile, graduating in both
Universities with votes of honor.
During this period she was
also admitted as a free student at the School of Dance of that
University, where she studied Modern and Contemporary Technique of
Dance with the Master Jorge Oléa (Director of the School of Dance of
the University of Chile) and Folk dances with the Master Carlos Reyes
Zárate (Artistic Director of the National Folkloric Ballet
BAFONA)
As part of her artistic searching she also made
several ritual research trips to the Amazon Rainforest and the Oruro
Carnival in Bolivia, connecting these concerns with self-taught
studies of Philosophy, Astrology, Symbolism and Tarot.
Since
1997 and to date, she has been doing an intense work as a
Scenographer, Producer and Director of various scenic projects in
Chile and other countries.
She won, together with several
theatre companies, the National Fund for the Arts "Fondart"
(Chile) in the years 2001, 2003, 2004, 2007 and 2012.
As a
teacher, she worked in the areas of Costumes, Scenery, Lighting and
Design Production for Theater and Film professions at the
Technological University of Chile.
In 2011 she moved to live
in Germany, where she founded - together with the actor and Theatre
Director Alvaro Solar - the Association for Art and Human Rights
"Eine Verkehrte Welt" (Upside down World) and the Theatre
Company “Theater Aber Andersrum” (Theatre But Upside Down),
several Productions to date, with which she has toured in
Internationals Festivals of Cuba, Chile, Switzerland, Italy, Austria,
Holland and a lot of cities in Germany.
Her artistic concerns
lead her to begin a new phase of her creation as a Visual artist.
Between
2012 and 2019, she rmakes several individual and collective
exhibitions in Germany, Switzerland, Chile and Italy. The German
press has praised her artwork, highlighting them as a new hybrid
aesthetic, which is situated between Jugendstil and Magical Latin
American Realism.
In her artistic work Cristina Collao has
always sought a connection between social, political and metaphysical
issues.
Statement
KOYAO
The
understanding of a unified whole
as transcendental experience, in which infinity of vital
manifestations are intertwined - like superimposed or juxtaposed
dimensions - has been for me a magical approach to the sense of
existence.
Through painting I have reached to
crystallize that angle of reality that manifests itself to the most
subtle fields of perception.
Creating an image through painting is
for me an urgent act, wehre I seek to catch the most immanent and
fleeting side of existence: that one that transcends even life and
death.
In
my work as a designer, scenographer and visual artist, the human
condition and the configuration of otherness
have been, at the same time, central aspects of my thematic search.
In
my aesthetic search I have experimented with graphic, digital and
plastic elements.
The
human figure has always occupied a central role in my creations, but
not from a naturalistic searching of his representation, rather as a
hybrid configuration that give space to a plastic expression of
being, of its immaterial regions.
My digital works in black and
white for example, are for me like metaphysical radiographs of the
states of being.
As
a child I lived in a territory, where cultural imaginary was full of
magical beings, spirits and demons. A country where indigenous and
Catholic deities co-inhabited in religious syncretism.
The
civil-military dictatorship in Chile was the context in which my
childhood was spent. The events that happened during that period,
printed in the imaginary of my generation the notions of the most
bestly and monstrous in human being.
After
my Degree at the School of Design of the Catholic University of
Chile, and later in Art and Theater at the University of Chile, I
traveled to spend a season in the Amazon jungle. That was a place,
where life was overflowing with exuberance; nature and its imposing
power give form and meaning to existence. I participated in shamanic
rituals with indigenous people and Santeros,
which included, among others, the Ayahuasca
potion.
That
trip to the jungle opened for me a definitive route of observation of
parallel realities,
in which are cohabiting flora, fauna,
human beings, immaterial beings, demons and ancestral deities. Myth
and magic converge in the landscape of the Amazon with a power
impossible to find in the narrative inherent in other landscapes.
Today
I live in a city in northern Germany, a landscape where people from
different cultures live together. I hear different languages every
day and walk streets impregnated with that diversity.
The
daily work intermingles with the brutal impact of wars, attacks,
shipwrecks of so many human beings. And then, visions full of magical
beings, of demons, of life and death, of beauty and bestiality, come
back to my dreams.
When I work, a configuration of
multiple and cyclical reality becomes visible to me, vertiginous and
still at the same time, as if life itself were perched on the edge of
time and facing an imminent and invisible change at the same time ...
like in front of a paradigm, that time just lit up.
Inside
my paintings, time stands still or intersects, and the materials I
use capture the interstitial worlds that inhabit its folds. Because
in my paintings I do not try to configure the verisimilitude or the
implausibility of reality, but the communicative and expressive force
of existence, with all its mystery, infinite, to decipher.
