PAULA ARIAS ART

Paula Arias Art

María Paula Arias Falconí is a multidisciplinary contemporary artist whose practice brings together painting, field research, and collaboration with artisan communities in Ecuador. Her work is rooted in cultural memory, the relationship with territory, and the dialogue between ancestral knowledge and contemporary critical thinking.

Over more than four years of research in the Andean region, particularly in the province of Imbabura, Arias has developed an artistic process based on travel as a form of exchange and reconnection with cultural roots. Her work seeks to preserve the tangible and intangible heritage of Indigenous communities, valuing manual processes, intergenerational knowledge transmission, and environmental conservation as fundamental components of cultural identity.

Painting represents one of her primary languages: a material practice that expresses an intuitive, cyclical, and grounded gesture, understood as a connection between memory, body, and territory. Her artistic research promotes symbiotic relationships between art, community, and nature, fostering ancestral knowledge and its continuity for future generations.

Within this framework emerges the collaboration with Warmi Power EC, a project founded in 2023 together with Kichwa women artisans from the communities of Rumipamba, Chirihuasi, Chilco, Florida, and La Esperanza, in the province of Imbabura. The collective brings together women from different generations, aged 9 to 65, committed to preserving and revaluing Kichwa embroidery as a living cultural practice.

Warmi Power EC aims to improve the quality of life of women embroiderers in northern Ecuador by encouraging their participation in cultural initiatives and generating additional economic opportunities through the strengthening of their textile skills. The project promotes female empowerment, the construction of cultural identity, and the preservation of native languages, creating a community network based on knowledge exchange, collective creation, and the visibility of their practices.

Through collaborative workshops, the project develops textile collections that articulate identity, memory, and representations of the female body from a contemporary perspective. Traditional embroidery thus becomes a medium through which personal and collective experiences are narrated, reinterpreting history through the voices of Indigenous women, mothers, and creators.

The collaboration between María Paula Arias and Warmi Power EC proposes an artistic practice in which art functions as a space of cultural mediation, strengthening relationships between community, territory, and contemporary production.

studio link: www.paulaarias.art