Space Strategies

Uribe-Castro’s work begins with the observation of places and the objects, materials and structures that shape them. A project can begin with a discarded bottle, a construction barrier, a forgotten or abandoned subway station, a monument erected decades ago, an architectural detail, or simply a thread that, once followed, may lead towards a history that is no longer immediately visible. Sometimes, the starting point can be a story found in a newspaper, a note in an archive, a single piece in a museum collection or a conversation among friends and colleagues. Through fieldwork and historical research, these initial encounters develop into projects that examine how political, economic and social histories continue to shape the spaces we inhabit.

Working across installation, sculpture, video, printmaking and interventions in public space, Uribe-Castro uses materials and objects as carriers of these histories. Rather than illustrating his research, he transforms, reproduces, displaces or reactivates what he encounters. Construction materials can become ornaments; a historical printing workshop can become a site for collective production; an architectural ruin can be transformed through water and reflection; a monument can be reconsidered through the histories that produced it. The resulting works create situations in which past events become physically present and can be experienced from the conditions of the present.

His training as an architect is central to this approach. Uribe-Castro understands architecture not only as the design of buildings, but as a way of reading how societies find themselves reflected in space and territory: what they preserve and what they erase, who is represented, who is excluded, and how collective memory is constructed. This allows his projects to move between the specific conditions of a place and larger histories of colonialism, modernisation, migration and social transformation.

Across his practice, places are therefore not treated as neutral settings for artworks, but as active participants in their development. By working with what is already there —its materials, architecture, histories and communities— Uribe-Castro creates works that make visible the forces that have shaped our surroundings and that continue to operate within them