Mineral Witness steel, salt, vinegar, sound                
Mining infrastructures of extractivist modes of production and their colonial histories. Layers of sediment peeled back during precious metal and mineral mining, leaving behind a perforated landscape, cavities, scars and porous surfaces. Through the interplay of rust, sound, and steel, the work performs a shift in agency: from metal as mined resource to metal as witness. Invoking synthesized sounds, processes samples and processes of corrosion as a material form of resistance, transformed into resonant instruments.
2025

Corroded steel plates, rusted with alchemical potions of rust and vinegar. Reverberating resonant frequencies of sonic vibrations. 

[listen to sound]

Encounters with rivers:
dreaming towards intimacy and contaminationAn artistic research along the Orinoco and the IJssel 2024
This project is an artistic research along the Orinoco delta and the IJssel river.  Focusing on rivers as living, historical complex entities, evolving spaces and agents; recognising their histories, cultures, traumas and secrets. Expressed as an invitation to question the haunting presence of past traumas, forgotten, repressed or denied histories. Decolonial epistemologies emphasize that the formation of the modern world is inextricable from the violent processes of colonial expansion, evidenced in our modern/western attitudes towards rivers and waters. The project urgently calls for an embrace of unknowing through a dynamic exploration of embodied knowledge, materiality, memory, and submerged narratives. Shining a light upon the urgency of returning to a relational understanding of water. To question the conventional narratives of modernity that have historically marginalized non western and non human ways of being and knowing. To urge a rethinking of ownership and agency, towards; thinking with water. Emphasising how the fluidity and turbulence of waterways are agents to escape from colonial structures.












Premiered at EYE film museum, ‘Research Labs’ Jan 2025

      Video, 9’58, 16:9, Artistic research zine, Distilled Scent of the IJssel river

                               [watch video here]
                               [link to research zine] 

Biomechanical Enchantments
2025

 A mine, an anatomical theatre, and a witches kitchen; Encountering the uterus as a contested site of extraction, (re)production, and transformation. Tracing the deep entanglements between metallurgy, witchcraft, and medicine. Extractivist mining of mother earth and medical anatomist practices of dissection deemed the female body exploitable for the benefit of capitalist labour systems that mechanize the uterus as an object of (re)production. Within this assemblage of nests of care, labour and exploitation, the mechanisation of bodies and landscapes is contested through the reclamation of ancestral knowledges,  rituals of care, potion-making, and microbial cultivation. The installation inhabits the entangled boundaries of production and exploitation, growth and decay, resistance and transformation.





Exhibited at ‘BATTLEAXE’, 
Unit2, Stleonards, UK
Oct2025





hand forged gynecological tools, irrigation system of abortifacient potions and bacterial cultures, mugwort, steel ring, printed leaf with ‘anatomical model’, poppy seed, dragonfly

[View]

Parasitic Motherhood

A mine, an anatomical theatre, and a witches kitchen; forged material embodiments of the exploitation of the uterus. Spaces where bodies and landscapes are mechanised as objects of (re)production. The nest of care and labour cultivates the growth of a new life, which in its monstrosity, blurs the boundaries of production and exploitation, natural and artificial, growing and dying. 
2025



 Exhibited at AKI Finals 
June, 2025




 Aluminium, steel, irrigation system of abortifacient potions and bacterial cultures, mugwort, tansy, pennyroyal, symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast, video projection 

[Link to interview]

(re)production 

plastic, steel, salt, vinegar, tool, wood prints, archival images; 
‘lucas and his assistant dissect a female cadaver’, ‘The anatomical venus’ 
2025



Exhibited at ‘Dissonance’
Cowmag, UT Vrijhof, Enschede, Sep - Nov 2025


The hand of Venus 

Steel, tin, graphite, engraving, ‘medieval cesarean’
2025




Echoes on porous ground 

Pigment print on paper, ceramic, steel, ash, carbon
2024

Anatomical Instruments 
Hand forged steel tools inspired by gynecological instruments. 
2025


LUCIA CONDE ARENAS  multidisciplinary artist / researcher

(she / her) 
venezuelan / welsh 
based in amsterdam
[link to CV] 

My practice is rooted in the intersections of moving images, installation, audio, writing, metalworking and scent. Approaching the relationality of materials in an archival sense, the urgency of my practice lingers within encountering a never ending unraveling of questions. Conjuring dreams of decolonial fables, multispecies futures, ancestral knowledges, hybridity, and ecological narratives, towards cyclical learning. Recognising the agency and interdependence between materials and bodies as rhizomatic networks. Through methodologies of storytelling; what archives of buried narratives, counter knowledges and situated resistances, can we encounter, listen to, and learn from? As an invitation of regenerative practices towards relational ways of living.

Selected
  1. Mineral Witness
  2. Encounters with Rivers: dreaming towards intimacy and contamination
  3. Biomechanical Enchantments
  4. Parasitic Motherhood 
  5. (Re)Production
  6. The hand of Venus 
  7. Echoes on Porous Ground
  8. Anatomical Instruments 
CONTACT: 
@lucia.condearenas
luciacondearenas@gmail.com
+31 614991375