Maflo (María Florencia) Martínez is an Afro-descendant visual artist and Visual Arts teacher graduated from the Instituto Superior Antonio Ruiz de Montoya. Maflo gives workshops, seminars and provides spaces for the production of works in her studio-workshop ‘Ruda’. She is a member of the collective of artists ‘Relatos Visuales’ and the AMTAV—Asociación misionera de trabajadores de las artes visuales. She also continues her uninterrupted production where she finds as a motor the vulnerability understood as an open wound, as a trench/border between the internal and intimate and the external or socially constructed, she seeks with her works to approach with tenderness the emotional and identity wounds and from them she makes visual translations towards drawing, painting, sculpture, photography, video art, etc.

In July 2024, the artist received a grant to participate in the Palimpsest Mural Painting Residency programme. During her time at ´ace, Maflo spent her time on the terrace incorporating her mural painting to the ones already painted. Her painting project, closely linked to her Afro-descent and the issues that touch her as a member of that community collective, is inspired by Ilda’s story, a personal narrative inscribed in the social framework of a communal experience on the margins of history.

ARTIST STATEMENT

My production is driven by vulnerability understood as an open wound, as a trench/border between the internal and intimate and the external or socially constructed. With my works I seek to approach with tenderness the emotional and identity wounds and from them to make visual translations into drawing, painting, sculpture, photography or video art. Stories construct territorialities and bring down the linear notion of history. The story of Ilda, my Afro-descendant grandmother, and the history that she keeps and that reaches me, is that of a part of the Afro-descendant community of the Province of Misiones. Through the construction of affable encounters with people self-perceived as Afro-descendants, we were able to arrive at some oral accounts of our ancestors, history and narratives about current experiences of identity, both intimate and social, as well as spiritual. These encounters gave us the substance to collectively reconstruct, from the affective, a kind of network-map that helps to make visible, commemorate and safeguard through another medium – the visual, in this case pictorial – the history of our community.