Pedro Granados Thorin: Consciousness as Language and Resistance
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Research and writing: Area Temporal Editorial TeamArchive: Artistic Mapping Open Call 2026
Pedro Granados Thorin’s work stands out within the context of contemporary Latin American art for its multidisciplinary practice, rigorously articulating the material, the audiovisual, and the theoretical. His production not only moves across distinct languages — including painting, ceramics, and video art — but integrates them as complementary systems of investigation. Rather than centering identity as its primary axis, his practice is organized around consciousness, understood as a phenomenon operating across multiple scales: from the intimate and perceptual to the collective, political, and environmental.
One of the most significant aspects of his production lies in the use of video as a dispositif of translation and expansion. Through his audiovisual proposals, the artist constructs narratives that displace his investigations toward the social, political, and environmental spheres, inserting them into contemporary logics of image production and consumption. Video does not function merely as a support, but as a field in which the language previously developed through other media acquires a narrative, theoretical, and openly critical dimension. Works such as Water Under Threat and The Monocultures of the Mind reveal this position, articulating a situated consciousness around territory, ecological conflict, and structures of power.
In contrast, ceramics function as the point of departure for this investigation: a space of intimate exploration where consciousness manifests as an expanded experience. Through clay, the artist activates a language that evokes forms of thought linked to millenary traditions. His pieces — far removed from utility — materialize as faces and configurations approaching fractality, suggesting states of perception connected to ancestral cosmologies and notions of expanded consciousness, now reconfigured within a global context. Without resorting to appropriation, his practice establishes a resonance with these forms of knowledge, recognizing in them a pathway for thinking Latin America from the present.
In this sense, ceramics not only enter into dialogue with art and tradition, but also place tension upon the boundaries between the artisanal and the artistic. By situating these forms within a contemporary framework, the artist questions the historical hierarchies of the art field and reveals the power relations traversing it. Matter thus becomes a critical dispositif: a site where the technical, the symbolic, and the political operate simultaneously.
Painting, meanwhile, functions as a space of transition and interlocution. It is the medium through which this language — charged with symbolic and perceptual resonances — shifts toward critical consciousness. Through a consistent authorial gesture, the artist articulates a visuality that connects these dimensions with broader concerns tied to the social sphere and to a critical consciousness situated within the tensions of contemporaneity. Painting does not merely synthesize: it activates a threshold, translating the ancestral into a field of enunciation where forms of denunciation and critical thought emerge.
This articulation between disciplines does not respond to a logic of isolated media, but rather to a stratified system of thought. Ceramics activate consciousness through the perceptual and symbolic; painting shifts it toward a critical dimension; and video expands it toward the collective, where it acquires a conceptual and political character. Taken together, his practice configures a coherent body of work that proposes a reading of consciousness as a field in transformation, traversed by territory, history, and contemporary dynamics.
Another key element in his work is its social articulation. His production is not confined to conventional art spaces, but extends into diverse contexts, reinforcing the public dimension of his investigations. This openness is also sustained through essay writing, where the artist develops a body of thought that accompanies and deepens his visual practice, placing it in dialogue with current debates in contemporary philosophy.
In this sense, his work acquires particular relevance within the Latin American panorama: not only for addressing urgent issues such as environmental crisis and territorial tensions, but for proposing an understanding of consciousness as a central axis through which to think contemporary experience. From the intimate to the collective, his work traces a trajectory in which image, matter, and thought converge as tools for interrogating the present.
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