Biography
Miguel Braceli is an interdisciplinary artist working at the intersection of art, architecture, and social practices. His practice focused on participatory art projects in public space; exploring geopolitical and local conflicts. Most of these projects have been large-scale works developed in Latin America, Europe, and the United States. He has led educational and artistic projects with institutions such as Documenta Fifteen, The Bronx Museum of Arts, The MUAC-UNAM with Hemispheric Institute NY, Matadero Madrid, and Pace Gallery. He has participated in residencies and programs such as the MacDowell Fellowship (2023) Skowhegan School of Painting (2022), AIM Bronx Museum Fellow (2022), Art Omi (2021), McColl Center for Art (2020). His most recent acknowledgments are the Fulbright Scholar (2020-2019) and the Young Artist Award of the Principality of Asturias (2018). In 2021 He founded LA ESCUELA___ together with the non-profit Siemens Stiftung International. In 2022 he received a commission from the Percent for Art program for a permanent large-scale public artwork in New York City.
Artist Statement
I work with participatory projects based on collective learning and making. They are site-specific works that bring together communities, schools, and organizations in the development of Proyectos Formativos (Formative Projects): community-based projects whose main medium is education. Addressing social-political issues, these projects happen in public space to create collective responses from, with and for specific communities.
Trained as an architect in Venezuela, my art practice emerged as a resilient response to our multiple crises. Later I understood how this practice is rooted in a long genealogy of Latin American artists and educators—who seek to bring education closer to real contexts, so as to learn and act on them. Through an interdisciplinary approach, my practice sits at the intersection between art and architecture; performance, media and installation; activism and education.
Within a larger artistic research, I am interested in the relationship between the body and the territory, between the individual being and the collective body, between order and contingency of open-ended projects in the expanded field. From vast geographies to more intimate connections on a human scale, many of my works explore notions of borders, migration, identity, human rights and geopolitical conflicts. They aim for equity as matter to build and strive to reconfigure that substance into meaningful social connections.
