Mauricio Herrero
Together Apart: #Nest

Mauricio Herrero is a Costa Rican visual artist. He earned his MFA in Fine Arts from Parsons The New School for Design, NY, NY. He also has a Master’s degree in Visual Arts and Education from the University of Barcelona and a Bachelor and Bachelor of Fine Arts with an emphasis in Engraving from the University of Costa Rica. Through his artistic practice, he interrogates the possibilities of print media and other processes, exploring divisions between categories, concepts and territories. It analyzes the relationships between economic and aesthetic value, as well as new forms of exchange. Since 2020 he has been the founder and director of Casa 49 in San José, Costa Rica. This is conceived as a space for art, research and experimentation. It is a center for the exploration of ideas, creative initiatives, curatorial and pedagogical processes, artistic research and social practice.

MAURICIO ABOUT TOGETHER APART: NEST

During NEST I participated in two collaborative projects. In the first, we started from what NEST meant for each of the participants, deriving from the concepts of discomfort, confinement and movement. Each participant proceeded to generate visual associations from these concepts. Later we proceeded to intervene the images made by others, without knowing what their specific link was with the concepts raised (their interpretation). A final step consisted in the integration of these hybrid images into a single audiovisual material, thus blurring the boundaries between subjective and collective narratives.

In the second collaborative project, chance played a role, by taking notes of our first casual conversation around many topics, somehow linked to NEST. These notes became the material recited live, in a performative way while superimposed images of the three members were projected spinning, with an almost hypnotic effect. The integration of the live recitation together with the edited visual material, made this a project specific to the videoconference medium.