Estudios de Campo

Christian "Mono" Lira is a visual artist and audiovisual producer. He received an Honorable Mention in the MAVI Actual Foundation Grant in its 2020 edition. He studied Visual Arts and Advertising at the Universidad Diego Portales.

In his work he uses various media and devices, such as video, painting, installation and sculpture, developing it mainly through a geometric language, whose origin comes from his early relationship with architecture, a discipline that makes dialogue with the geographical landscape and the concept of inhabiting, from research and observation exercises.

Urbanism and its complexity is an important theme in Lira's work. His work represents social problems and local reflections, and arises from the real and verifiable, based on concrete abstraction, raising demographic, existential and social questions.

From the abstraction of everyday forms, Lira represents models or scenes. The documentation of spaces and territories throughout the country, through images and videos, is part of his creative practice and his work. He portrays mainly buildings, such as bridges, stairs, factories, walkways, elevators, among others, structures belonging to a modern architecture.

His videos also show everyday objects, such as cars or waste, as well as nature and human beings. He constantly records actions, which he then transforms into an infinite repetition.

His work moves between the past and the future, between the timeless, the utopian and also the modern, through the capture of images and videos, which makes the public be transported to the reality of his work and be moved.

In relation to the MAVI Actual Foundation Grant, "Mono" Lira believes that,

"It is a very good instance, which gives the opportunity for an artist to work for a while on a specific project, developing it autonomously and with the tools to be able to concentrate fully on a long-term work".