About
Hi! I’m Micaela Koenig Drouet (b. 2000, Guayaquil, Ecuador), a multidisciplinary artist and tattooist living and working in Quito, Ecuador. In my practice, which stems from writing and drawing into conceptual and material research, I explores and abstract conceptual spaces from daily life through arbitrariness and play. I create graphic and visual spaces where certain logics are suspended and others are established, exploring, from the notion of power, themes such as language, misunderstandings, desire, spaces of contradiction and banality. I’m also interasted in design, academic writing and curatorial practices.I began my studies in art in England in 2019 and completed my BA of Visual Arts with a minor in Philosophy at Universidad San Francisco de Quito in 2023. I have participated in group exhibitions such as Resistencia (2019), Fluctuaciones (Q Galería, 2020), Punto de partida (Q Galería, 2021), Mascar sin escupir (Residencia la Planta, 2021), Coordenadas (Q Galería, 2022), as well as in DIY exhibition projects such as Redbull Wishes (Lund, Sweden, 2022). My first solo exhibition 'Un hombre misterioso me llamó y me dijo que las compus son nubes en la jerarquía del cielo' at Camareta Espacio Experimental (2023) was an exhibition project about superfluous desire and the found object, where I explored different instances of being a collector/accumulator of fantasies and objects.
Statement
My practice is based on a complicity with an englobing/connective instinct that associates and connects different levels of meaning with each other and with the material. Wishfully and purposefully I build upon the concrete and stretch it into moments of synchrony with the abstract. Through a sort of artificial (as in purposeful and mannered), and hyper-literal schematic, diagrammatic and graphic thinking, I define, classify and extrapolate concepts from everyday life into a speculative generality. Through these exercises, the structures, guidelines and implications of themes such as language, desire, neutrality, etc., begin to communicate with each other because they respond to common superstructures; stretched and over-encompassing superstructures.These conceptual explorations are part of an intuitive and playful exercise. My creative process is very aligned to the Situationists’ ‘dérive’. Through drifting (both introspectively and collectively), I create intuitive drawing and writing which are often the basis for my bigger projects. Assuming the arbitrariness of gesture as well as the conceptual misunderstandings that arise from action, allows for the expression of a volatile, expansive, and meaning-seeking sensitivity. I tend to describe the results of these explorations as selective (I like to reiterate the arbitrariness that comes with selecting/connecting different levels of meaning, as well as thinking about the powers implied in this exercise) accumulations of meaning.
On a day-to-day basis, I mainly create through writing, drawing, and tattooing (as a trained tattoo artist). I also engage in illustration, digital media, design, and conceptual research. I am also interested in curatorial, academic, and writing practices that go hand in hand with visual explorations. Choosing a medium is too a part of the before-mentioned dérive, in which the paths explored begin demanding particular connections with the material. Cross-disciplinary practical, philosophical, technical and conceptual research is crucial for a curious and mutable practice that seeks to dissect the various languages that constitute it.
In my most recent work, which connects desire and my practice of collecting objects street-found-objects, I’ve been exploring different instances of my processes as a recollector of objects and a newly found ‘desirer’ and accumulator of fantasies. The gestures involved in the collection of objects and fantasies connect through the consolidation of a space of common suspension, fabulation, in all its disparity, is encompassed and understood from a poetic reasoning. The everyday fantasy that suspends, spins, unravels, re-spins logics, fictions and forced symbols, executes a conscious but superfluous act, such as the act of collecting objects, that tries to reconcile its frustration against the involuntary fantasy of memory or at the other extreme, manifestation.