Cristina Maldonado is a Mexican interdisciplinary artist based in Prague (CZ), working in the fields of immersive art, participatory and relational art, video-performance, and site-specific performances. For the last two decades, she has been working independently, directing, performing, mentoring, and leading workshops and collaborations. She has presented her work in America and Europe. Currently, she is focused on the concepts of mediation and uncharted relations.

Her most recent production called Insider is an immersive performance for two audience members at a time that uses touch-scapes and 360 degrees video to explore the effects of mixed reality on our bodies and our sense of being present. During the performance, the choices of each individual viewer create a particular way of investigating their own bodies and experiencing the proposed world.

Some years ago, she started experimenting with families as the basic cells of social interaction through an art workshop on family archaeology. Families brought their photographs, invested their time in them to collaboratively create a video-collage together through a video device of interaction that Maldonado prepared.

“Through this experience, I understood how memory, creativity, and affective connection are present in art. That made me visualize types of interactions as artistic media that can infiltrate everyday life relationships and activities. This gave me the understanding that a social relation can be a product of a designed space and situation.”

In 2018, Maldonado was one of the residents in Metropolis in Copenhagen (DK). She worked with the concept of exchange between individuals in public spaces. She worked collaboratively with a group of people/families through the connections of memory, identity, personal narratives, artefacts, places, and objects. These long term collaborations grow around the concept of the gift as a ritual in contemporary society.

Maldonado's practice allows her to observe the chaotic and fortuitous events in daily life, curate them and construct systems of interaction and collective creation of meaning.