Landscape as a living body
Carolina Oltra
builds her artistic practice around a recurring question: what remains of a territory when the body leaves it? Trained in painting, architecture, and art history between Chile and the United States, Oltra works with photography, mixed media, and installation to investigate the intersections of emotional memory, displacement, and ecology.
Her central project, Unreachable Landscape (2018–), unfolds across successive chapters as an exploration of the relationship between the human body and the plant world. The first chapter emerged from an artistic residency at the Adolpho Ducke ecological reserve in the Brazilian Amazon, where Oltra developed performative actions
of bodily measurement and aerial documentation on the Negro River. The work challenges anthropocentric perceptions of the ecosystem, drawing on the genealogy of Joseph Beuys while tracing its own distinct trajectory.
Subsequent chapters — Imaginary Plant, Fragmented Memory, Abundance — deepen this investigation from Germany, where Oltra lives. Distance becomes methodology: the desire to recover the Puya chilensis, an endemic plant from her Chilean childhood, materializes in cameraless photograms, terrariums, sounds generated from the
plant's own electrical signals, and collective reforestation actions on the coast of Valparaíso. Landscape is not represented — it is reconstituted.
Her work has been exhibited at documenta 15 (Kassel, 2022), Bienal Sur (Buenos Aires), MAC Bogotá, Galería Isabel Aninat (Santiago), Instituto Cervantes (Frankfurt), and
the Chilean Embassy in Berlin, among others. Her work is held in public collections in Colombia, Chile, and Mexico.
She lives and works in Mönchengladbach, Germany.
