centro cultural tina modotti Sofia Veliz (Guatemala)
Sofia Veliz (1992) is a Guatemalan industrial designer.
Sofía Véliz runs a multidisciplinary practice driven by her taste for unusual materials: she has used asphalt as lacquer for her abstract paintings and salt to crystallize the surface of her aluminum pots.
Guatemala may not have a long history of industrial design, but it does have a rich tradition of craftsmanship, and Véliz sees that dichotomy as an invitation “to push the boundaries” — or, rather, to figure out which boundaries exist in what she calls a “very conservative society.”
Véliz was born in Mexico City, where her family had moved as political exiles in the early 1980s. They returned to Guatemala City when she was 4, but her childhood remained nomadic: She credits her parents’ complete disinterest in possessions for giving her the impetus to attend design school.
While studying at Rafael Landívar University, she discovered such freewheeling international designers as Max Lamb, Maarten Baas and Martino Gamper, all of whom motivated her to ignore convention when founding her studio in 2016; good design, she realized, didn’t have to mean the shiny furniture of her middle-class schoolmates.
It could be one of her thickly knotted sculptures, crafted from poured-concrete arcs still scuffed from their molds.
“Since there’s not a strict design legacy here, there are no strict rules to follow,” she says.
Sofía Véliz (1992) es una diseñadora industrial que vive y trabaja en el centro de la Ciudad de Guatemala.
Nació en México, hija de un arquitecto y una licenciada en letras y regresó a los 4 años a Guatemala.
Buscó una disciplina que recopilara sus intereses e inquietudes: la fotografía y el diseño, por ejemplo. De ahí que se decantara por el Diseño industrial. Una carrera que inicia y ya ha cosechado sus primeros frutos.
Basta googlear Sofía Véliz para que el buscador despliegue información sobre su trabajo. Uno de los sitios que ha resaltado sus piezas es la revista AD, de Alemania, y la publicación en línea Sight Unseen, ambas, referentes en el mundo donde existe mobiliario que desafía la imaginación, utensilios que parecen de una película de ciencia ficción y picaportes que te invitan a ser fotografiados.
Los textos resaltan sus piezas, intereses y la necesidad de utilizar distintos materiales para expresar en una escultura o mobiliario, aquello que su creatividad necesita dar a conocer.
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opera: Sofia Veliz
