Enrique Traver Barbabosa (b. 1993, Mexico City) born too early to be a TikTok star, born too late to be a soap opera actor, is a multidisciplinary artist working across painting, performance, photography, and installation.
His practice explores the relationship between memory, identity, and landscape, investigating how personal and collective histories are embedded in materials and environments.
Often working with found textiles, natural elements, and performative gestures, he creates works that emerge through direct interaction with specific places.
Studied Fine Arts at Parsons School of Design in New York and Culture and Media Studies at Eugene Lang College, graduating with honors. His work has been presented in exhibitions and artist-run spaces in NYC, CDMX, Brazil, Iceland, Chile and Portugal. Through pilgrimages, collaborative performances, and site-responsive painting, he examines how ritual actions and shared experiences transform landscapes into spaces of meaning.
During my residency at Hektor, I would like to continue an ongoing body of work exploring pilgrimage, landscape, memory, and transformation through found textiles and embodied actions.
My recent experience at La Wayaka Current in the Atacama Desert, an artist residency focused on art and ecology, deepened my interest in how a landscape can become an active part of the artistic process. During that residency, I developed a pilgrimage through the desert in which I carried a found cross through the landscape. The journey became a way of thinking about faith, territory, memory, and the relationship between the human body and an extreme environment.
I would like to continue this research in Lanzarote, bringing a piece of fabric with me as the starting material for a new pilgrimage. I am interested in carrying, walking with, and physically activating the textile within Hektor and its surrounding landscape, allowing wind, volcanic soil, light, vegetation, and the rhythms of the land to leave traces on the material. The fabric could subsequently be painted, cut, sewn, stained, or otherwise transformed in response to what I encounter during the residency.
I am particularly interested in Hektor because the relationship with the land is not only a subject but part of the daily life of the residency. Participating in the regenerative work of the farm would allow me to encounter Lanzarote through physical labor, observation, and repetition rather than only as a landscape to be represented. I am interested in what happens when artistic practice and care for a place begin to overlap.