Mariana Castillo Deball
Born in Mexico City, 1975 and lives in Berlin
Mariana Castillo Deball uses installation, sculpture, photography and drawing to explore the role objects play in our understanding of identity and history. Engaging in prolonged periods of research and field work, she takes on the role of the explorer or the archeologist, compiling found materials in a way that reveals new connections and meanings. In Castillo Deball’s 2013 work Stelae Storage, plaster casts copied from monolithic Mayan stone sculptures called stelae are displayed on metal racks similar to those found in a museum’s storage area. In a similar work, Lost Magic Kingdoms Paolozzi (2013), Castillo Deball culled photographic reproductions from the personal archives of late Scottish artist Eduardo Paolozzi, who mixed pop and ethnographic references.
