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Claudia Kaatziza Cortinez
Project
BOSQUE DE SAL
About the work
An artistic and material exploration of Villa Epecuén, a lakeside town in Argentina
submerged by a flood in 1985. For years it lay beneath a hypersaline lake, its structures
slowly dissolving in mineral-rich water. Decades later, the town resurfaced—crystallized
by salt and time. This project traces what endures through processes of decay,
mineralization, and resilience—gathering residues, observing corrosion, and composing
a visual and material essay on transformation and the fragile memory of built
environments.
The images are gum prints, a 19th-century photographic process and the first to
produce color. Pigments—or pigment-bearing materials—are mixed with gum arabic
and a light-sensitive solution. After UV exposure, the gum hardens; the print is then
developed slowly in water, softening the surface and gradually revealing the image. It is
a tactile, time-based process shaped by light, dissolution, and emergence.
This series focuses on the trees that remain—twisted, salt-bleached trunks reduced to
gnarled textures. Each image is printed with pigments derived from materials native to
the region, including cochineal, mollisol soil, and quebracho bark. These deep colors
stand in contrast to the present landscape, reimagining the trees as vivid, spectral
figures—saturated with hues rooted in their surroundings.
Matter
Gumprints using various earth-based pigments, gum arabic, diazo
Variable dimensions
2015
Claudia Kaatziza Cortínez is an Argentine/Chilean/American visual artist currently based in NYC. She received her BFA from RISD and MFA from Yale. Her work often begins with a camera as a drawing tool, exploring cities and landscapes to find surfaces, patterns, and other particularities that she transforms back in the studio. Central to her practice is experimenting with materials like paper pulp, handmade pigments, and light-sensitive chemistry to create photograms, rubbings, and architectural casts that evoke past or imagined landscapes. These processes merge photography, drawing, printmaking, and sculpture, often incorporating text from an archive of her father's poetry and collaborations with her niece, also a poet. She also creates large-scale installations that replicate the original scale of a site, weaving personal, familial, and location-specific narratives. Through these projects, she explores how objects and textures communicate deeper stories about home, identity, and memory. Recent awards and residencies include: Yale Norfolk Teaching Fellowship, Silver Art Projects Residency, Rema Hort Mann Grant, Center for Book Arts Residency, LES Printshop Residency, LMCC Community Engagement Grant, among others. She is currently an artist in residence at the Manhattan Graphic Center, at Powerhouse Arts
