Elena Bajo
Elena Bajo is an artist, educator and founder of the S-LAB Project, an ecological art platform dedicated to climate action, located in Wonder Valley Californian desert. Using Celtic ancestral methods and a trans-disciplinary art practice which combines sculpture, film, and performance, they mine vibrant plant systems to discover their unique material forms and activate new forms of consciousness. After obtaining a degree in Pharmacology from, University Complutense (Madrid, ES) they received an MFA from Central Saint Martins (London, UK) and an MA in Genetic Architecture from ESARQ UIC (Barcelona, ES), Laban and Bartenieff Movement at TanzFabrik, Berlin Contemporary Dance Center.
By merging ancestral methods with contemporary art practices across fine arts, ethnobotany, dance, choreography, and poetry, Elena Bajo delves into vibrant plant systems to unveil their unique consciousness. Her art serves as a platform for researching and reviving ancestral ethnobotanical knowledge, engaging with environmental justice issues, and fostering collective empowerment through artistic expression and community collaboration. Elena's diverse artistic approach spans choreography, sculpture, performance, painting, poetry, and video, embodying a holistic exploration of ecology, history, and human connection to the non-human world.
Her artistic practice occurs at the intersection of anarchist thought, social ecology, and metaphysics, engaging ideas of nature, and the body as a political and social entity questioning its relationship to ecologies of capital. She works both individually and collectively, using a post-disciplinary approach to choreography, sculpture, performance, architecture, life sciences, text and video. Concept-generated and research-based is concerned with the ecological, social, and political dimensions of everyday spaces, the strategies to conceptualize resistance, the poetics of ideologies, and the relationship between temporalities and subjectivities. Exhibition spaces become art studios or laboratories, where an experimental, itinerant, site-specific performed work unfolds, generating improvised actions and choreographed movements. The resulting works are both conceptual and poetic, in the sense they are linked to cognitive labor; a labor that cannot be valued and has no limits as it is the condition of precarious work in today’s neoliberal economy generated amidst ecosophical moments of fracture and repositioning, in an attempt to entertain fissures in a world of crystallized sensibility.
After obtaining a degree in Pharmacology from the Complutense University in Madrid, (Spain) she received an MA in Genetic Architecture from ESARQ, School of Architecture at International University of Catalunya, Barcelona (Spain) and an MA in Fine Arts from Central Saint Martins School of Art, University of Arts, London (UK). She has studied Laban / Bartenieff Movement Principles with Eva Blaschke, Christel Büche, and Jan Burkhardt at TanzFabrik, Center for Contemporary Dance, Berlin She was a co-founder of the temporary art project EXHIBITION 211, in New York. She has taught and lectured at Saas-Fee Summer Institute of Art, Berlin; Goldsmith’s College, London; Rhode Island School of Design, RISD, Providence; and Sheffield Hallam University, Sheffield among other institutions.
EXHIBITIONS AND PERFORMANCES
2024 Elena Bajo Freya’s Grove (Eternal Return) SkulpturenPark Wesenberg | Gabarron Res DE
2022 Elena Bajo Dance of the Opium Poppy CRA Matadero Madrid ES (Performance)
2018 Elena Bajo C- Room Priska Pasquer Gallery Cologne DE
2018 Elena Bajo A Poem in Seven Movements Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts EFA NY US (Performance) 2017 Elena Bajo The Owl of Minerva only Flies at Dusk (Urania’s Mirror) Parallel Oaxaca Mexico DF MX 2017 Elena Bajo All Tangled Up in a Fading Star ArcoMadrid Audemars Piguet Award Madrid ES
2016 Elena Bajo Throwing Car Parts from a Cliff before Sunrise Garcia Galeria Madrid ES 2015 Elena Bajo Isle of Innocence After Fordlandia Kunsthalle São Paulo BR(c)
2015 Elena Bajo Time is the Form of the Object Annex14 Zurich CH
2015 Elena Bajo and Michal Budny ArcoMadrid Annex14 Madrid ES
2014 Elena Bajo With Entheogenic Intent (Burn the Witch) 18th Street Arts Center LA US (c) (+Performance) 2014 Elena Bajo Timeless Considerations Stacion - Center for Contemporary Art Prishtina Kosovo(+Perfor) 2014 Elena Bajo A Universe comes into Being ARTIUM Basque Museum-Vitoria-Gasteiz ES (c) (+Perfor)
PUBLICATION
2024 You should have seen it Skowhegan Art ZINE NY US
2023 Datura Soil of History I Write what you Write Curated by Ersi Varveri and Gijs Waterschoot Syros GR 2023 Spanish Women Artists Contemporary Art Institute IAC Madrid ES
2021 This is Jackalope Art Magazine Madrid ES
2021 Women Artists from Madrid, Spain Madrid ES
2020 Siegfried Contemporary London UK
2018 Elena Bajo Kuenstler Kritisches Lexikon der Gegenwartskunst Neu-Isenburg DE
2018 Itineraries Botin Foundation Santander ES
2017 The Pleiades Revista Sin Objeto Fine Arts Cuenca University Cuenca ES
2017 On Violence E.R.O.S. Press London UK
2014 With Entheogenic Intent (Burn the Witch) Published by 18th Street Arts Center LA CA US
2013 The Absence of Work Artist Book Published by Taube Edition Berlin DE
2013 La Femme Radical Commissioned by Octavio Zaya Atlantica Arts Journal ES
2012 The Factory of Forms Artist Book Published by Onomatopee Eindhoven NL
2011 On Uncertain Terms Artist Book Published by s/t Berlin DE