Maria Paris Borda is a Colombian artist based in Amsterdam, working with writing and spatial, often site-specific interventions. She works with space and language as parallel systems and investigates how they shape the conditions of what can be seen, felt, and understood.
Her methodology is rooted in treating a site as a prompt rather than a backdrop, working through spatial conditions to guide how works emerge. Rather than singular objects, Maria assembles constellations of industrial materials, text, sound, and light that register subtle shifts: the way sunset light enters a building, the instability of a mistranslated word, the shimmer of a surface. These works often occupy architectural edges such as corners, floors, ceilings, window openings, circumscribing space.
Light, particularly natural light, becomes an important material within this process. Entering a space at specific moments changes the perception of the work and introduces a temporal, spectral dimension to it. Language operates in a similar way. It is central to the process not as a description, but as material. Text is fragmented, reiterated or translated functioning alongside spatial elements through rhythm, punctuation, and pause.
Maria’s work draws on conceptualist and minimalist approaches shaped by Latin American histories of migration and linguistic fracture, and informed by feminist critiques of visibility, authorship, and control. Through repetition and restraint, she creates perceptual gaps where silence, history, and poetics take on material weight.
Full portfolio available on request at: mariaparisborda@gmail.com