Rosana Tijeras - Hair Salon

Rosana Escobar’s work revolves around the materiality of fique, delving into its tradition and memory to evoke possibilities for the future. Her artistic practice, rooted in diverse and seemingly unconnected territories, brings together technologies, processes, and dialogues centered on care and experimentation. 

Like hair, this natural fiber is encoded genetic material—a living extension of the body and its identity. A sensory interface with specific mechanical properties. Hair and fibers—from tangles to the softness of shine—require a hybridization of technologies, knowledge, crafts, and gestures mediated by attention, dexterity, and repetition. 

By shifting temporalities and contexts, fiber hairdressing proposes a change of perspective—an empirical dialogue that invites playful interaction and co-creation. It unfolds a haptic archive of artifacts that capture space and experience. They form a queer device that operates in two converging and harmonious spheres: one centered on the materiality of natural fibers, with an emphasis on creating pieces that explore the extension of the body and the mimicry of artifice. The other offers a mediated space for hospitality, the exploration of self-image, and rituals of care. Its specific activations, in collaboration with Carolina Viera, integrate hair and the role of her craft in active listening, which informs the search for self-representation and identity. 

From an ecological and biocentric perspective, the installation destabilizes hierarchies, infiltrating the norms of the aesthetic regime and challenging the fiction that separates humanity, culture, and nature—a fiction characteristic of modernity. To refocus the agency of the “quique” and its expressive possibilities, it calls for a poetics of metamorphosis that amplifies the body’s sensory technology and invents new shared narratives across species.

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