Cristian Herrera (Barcelona, 1988) holds a degree in Fine Art from the University of Barcelona. At present, she works as a freelance product designer. In 2017, she was invited to develop a design for the DEMO (AdiFAD) design festival in cooperation with Jorge Penadés, Guillermo Santomà, Toni Arola and Curro Claret, among other designers. She was also invited to take part in the group exhibition Poder ser at the Museu del Disseny de Barcelona (Barcelona Design Museum), along with other emerging designers. The winner of the 2014 Miquel Casablancas Prize for Dividir una montaña, she organises a children’s workshop at Sant Andreu Contemporani, as part of the Fènix i el Camí de Foc education project, directed by Antoni Hervàs. Sant Andreu Contemporani also published her work Salvar un elefante (2013) along with the notebooks of six other emerging artists.

Cristian Herrera works mainly in video and installation, though often as the result of a previous performative action. Her practice reveals an interest in interrelating with a given context through poetic challenge and daring, creating actions imbued with what we might call “domestic epic”. Some of her actions entail hard, even extreme confrontation with the natural environment (whether it be the sea or a snowy mountain), and introduce, not only the concept of risk, but also, at times, the idea of the absurd. Herrera carries out these actions alone or with close collaborators, using material she finds around her, always within a logic of self-sufficiency. Taken together, her work transmits a way of understanding art as a space to champion a romantic ideal and, also, as a place for resistance, from which to generate dysfunctions and procedures that question hegemonic thought.

Biography written in 2017