Biography
Nicole Vindel (Guatemala, 1992) is a visual artist based in Barcelona. Her practice operates at the intersection of sculpture, performance and installation. Through food, living materials like light, plants, water and soil, and everyday objects, she investigates how the designed world shapes human behavior, desire and perception. Her framework is what she calls critical hope, exploring culture, identity and ecology, and questioning our place in the world. She teaches and researches food design and food systems at Elisava.
Who is Nicole Vindel?
Nicole Vindel is a Guatemalan visual artist based in Barcelona. She works across sculpture, performance and installation, using food and living materials such as light, water, plants and soil. She has exhibited at Tate Exchange, the 13th Havana Biennial, the Mansfield Art Center, the MNAC and Palau Robert.
What is critical hope?
Critical hope is the framework Nicole Vindel gives her practice: taking the present seriously enough to question it, and the future seriously enough to imagine it differently. It is not optimism. It is the decision to look straight at what does not work without giving up on the idea that it could be otherwise.
That is where the tone of the work comes from. The pieces expose uncomfortable tensions, the politics of overproduction, the violence embedded in systems of abundance, the way language builds and forecloses possible worlds, and at the same time they propose a gesture: eating together, breaking bread, burning time, holding something alive.
Why does she work with food?
Because eating is the gesture where culture, identity, economy and ecology cross several times a day without anyone noticing. Food is not the subject of the work: it is the material and the language. A plate, a table or a piece of fruit already carries an idea of who eats, who serves and who is left out.
Her practice has widened to other living materials: water, sunlight, bonsai, soil, construction rubble. Materials we tend to call resources only once they stop being alive.
Where has she exhibited?
Among other venues, Tate Exchange (London), the 13th Havana Biennial, the Mansfield Art Center (Ohio), the MNAC, Palau Robert and the DHUB (Barcelona), Somos Arthouse (New York), the Rebirth Forum of Cittadellarte (Havana) and The Aram Gallery (London). The full listing is in the CV.
What does she teach, and where?
She has taught at Elisava since 2017, where she currently heads the Food Systems programs and takes part in Elisava Research and Elisava Business projects. She has also taught, among many other institutions, at IED, Escola Massana, Fondo School, LCI Barcelona, ESDI, Tilburg University, the University of Buenos Aires, Centro (Mexico City) and Universidad Rafael Landívar (Guatemala). She is the author of the course Storytelling through visual food narratives on Domestika.
Nicole Vindel (Guatemala, 1992) is a visual artist based in Barcelona, where she is a resident at Piramidon Centre d'Art Contemporani. Her practice operates across sculpture, performance and installation. Through food and living materials such as light, plants, water and soil, she investigates how the designed world shapes behavior, desire and perception. Her framework is what she calls critical hope. She has exhibited at Tate Exchange (London), the Mansfield Art Center (Ohio), the 13th Havana Biennial and the MNAC. Vogue Spain described her as a «food artist hungry for change».
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