María José Crespo
Tijuana, 1991
María José Crespo has a degree in visual arts from the Universidad Autónoma de Baja California, Tijuana campus, and a master’s degree from the Willem de Kooning Academy, Rotterdam. She received the acquisition award of the XXIII Bienal Plástica de Baja California, Mexico (2021). She has also received a scholarship for studies abroad from the Fundación Jumex Arte Contemporáneo (2021) and Jóvenes Creadores, in the alternative media category of the Sistema de Apoyos a la Creación y Proyectos Culturales (2020). He has been part of multiple selections in biennials and group exhibitions. Her most recent solo exhibition is entitled Female Flickers Over Built Environments at WET (Rotterdam, 2023). She was also part of the group exhibition entitled DU2024 (Heerlen, 2024). His work is mainly in the disciplines of installation, video and photography. He lives and works from Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
statement
Living in the border city of Tijuana in Mexico has made me question the way I inhabit boundaries as a woman. Boundaries are thick because they can expand into a zone of possibilities: they regulate everyday life, and everyday life always exceeds them. By stretching boundaries as geographical layers, territories become a double-edged zone: informalities become formal and personal matters become public as we understand how legality operates in everyday life. These types of zones are indecisive, they deny any attempt to be controlled by leaving material remains as evidence of the way they have been administered. I think of territory as a body that carries with it the traces of experiences; memories and stories, and things speak to me through materialities: textures, sounds and found objects that embody their characteristics as a place. In my practice, I understand materiality as a mixture of feelings, details of situations, systems and images that are held together by resilience, and I am interested in their location and what surrounds them, which I understand not only as textures or volumes but as the expressiveness of the way objects exist and act in given situations.
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