Eduardo Navarro

Eduardo Navarro was born in 1979 in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where he lives and works. His interdisciplinary practice explores perception and its relationship to changes in reality and time, bringing together sculpture, drawing, performance, installation, and participatory projects. His work is informed by both artistic and scientific research, as well as by spiritual and contemplative practices, and often takes the form of experimental situations designed to produce alternative ways of perceiving and understanding the world. Navarro frequently approaches each project as a kind of empirical study or case study, investigating how other organisms and elements might perceive, think, or communicate beyond the parameters of human experience. Rather than representing these forms of existence from an external perspective, he often attempts to construct situations in which participants can temporarily adopt other physical or sensory conditions. His projects therefore involve transformation not only as a metaphor, but as a physical and collective process. *OCTOPIA* (2016), presented at Museo Tamayo in Mexico City, brought together eighty participants who activated a large-scale octopus-like organism through coordinated movement. The project explored collective perception and social motricity while temporarily suspending individual identity within a shared bodily structure. This interest in altered states of perception extends to Navarro’s use of sculptural devices, costumes, sound, movement, and participatory actions. In *Sound Mirror* (2016), presented at the 32nd São Paulo Biennial, he created an acoustic instrument connecting a palm tree outside the exhibition pavilion with the interior of the exhibition space, proposing a form of communication that bypassed conventional verbal language. Other projects similarly investigate the relationships between bodies, natural phenomena, and forms of sensory knowledge, often drawing on collaboration with specialists from scientific, artistic, and other fields. A particularly important project in this context is *Into Ourselves*, first presented at der TANK in Basel in 2017 and subsequently at The Drawing Center in New York in 2018. The work consisted of a series of edible drawings inspired by the holographic principle of quantum physics. Navarro placed the drawings beneath heat lamps and gradually dissolved them into a soup, shifting attention from vision and aesthetic contemplation toward digestion and metabolism. The project transformed the act of looking into a physical process, proposing the body itself as a site of knowledge and perception. Navarro’s practice has been presented internationally at institutions and exhibitions including the São Paulo Biennial, the New Museum Triennial in New York, the Sharjah Biennial, MALBA in Buenos Aires, Castello di Rivoli, the High Line in New York, Museo Tamayo in Mexico City, and Gasworks in London. He has also participated in the Toronto Biennial of Art, where he presented *Wind Oracle* (2022), a public sculpture that invited audiences to engage with the movement of air and consider the relationship between humans and the natural environment. His work is held in institutional collections including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, MALBA, the Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires, Sharjah Art Foundation, Kadist, and Castello di Rivoli. LACMA’s collection includes *Letters to Earth* (2017), an installation comprising one hundred bronze walnuts placed on a bed of soil. Across sculpture, drawing, performance, and participatory installation, Navarro continues to investigate the transformative potential of art as a means of altering perception. His works create situations in which human bodies encounter other organisms, natural forces, and forms of knowledge, opening spaces for contemplation and for modes of communication that exceed conventional language and rational representation.