LOS ANGELES, CA.- This year’s Artist in Residence Carolina Caycedo (1978) is a Colombian multidisciplinary artist born in London and living in Los Angeles.

Her immense geographic photographs, lively artist’s books, hanging sculptures, performances, films, and installations are not merely art objects but gateways into larger discussions about how we treat each other and the world around us.

Through her studio practice and fieldwork with communities impacted by large-scale infrastructure and other extraction projects, she invites viewers to consider the unsustainable pace of growth under capitalism and how we might embrace resistance and solidarity. Process and participation are central to Caycedo’s practice, she contributes to the reconstruction of environmental and historical memory as a fundamental space for climate and social justice. Her work contributes to the construction of environmental historical memory as a fundamental element for non-repetition of violence against human and nonhuman entities.

“We look forward to Carolina’s response to Art & Technology, the 2023–2024 Getty Research Institute scholar theme, and also the focus of Getty’s PST ART: Art & Science Collide initiative, set to begin in September 2024.”

For the 2023–24 Artist In Residence program Caycedo will use the resources, archives, and libraries at the Getty Research Institute (GRI) to support the research and early editorial phase of the second volume of the Serpent River Book series.

Serpent River Book Vol. 1 (2017) is an accordion-fold artist-book that combines archival images, maps, poems, lyrics and satellite photos with the artist’s own research on the bio-cultural diversity of rivers, in a collage that twists and turns like a river. The pages flow organically and can be read in multiple directions revealing a performance potential wherein the book can also function as a score or workshop tool. The publication is part of a larger body of work, Be Dammed, that investigates the effects of extractivism on natural and social landscapes, exploring the power dynamics of the corporatization of water resources, and the socio-political effects on the communities living in proximity to these exploitative and destructive commercial activities.

Serpent River Book Vol. 2 will explore how the eco-social transition is being embodied by frontline communities in the Americas, presenting case studies—community proposals and life projects—woven together using eco feminist and traditional environmental frameworks.

Since 1992, the GRI has hosted 37 artists in residence, providing them with dedicated time and space to develop new creative output. The Artist in Residence program puts visual artists in dialogue with active researchers of visual culture. The program brings together contemporary and historical discussions of artistic practice in the creation, exhibition, and interpretation of art, and this nexus benefits new scholarship in art history and visual culture. The GRI’s collections not only preserve historical artistic practices but also become an integral tool of contemporary artistic practice and activate new directions in research.