Ceci Arango

Colombia

Ceci Arango is an Industrial Designer from Universidad Javeriana de Bogotá, with a master's degree in design management from the Domus Academy in Milan and a master's degree in Plastic Arts at the National University of Colombia. She has been dedicated since the beginning of the '90s to the projection in the contemporary world, of the cultures and the world, which are generally undervalued by the traditional Western, colonial and futurist currents of thought.

Her plastic language began with bamboo guadua between 1990 and 1991 and continued with until today in tropical woods intertwined with Macana palm wood, Chonta and Bombona. She works with textile art, mainly with the technique of basketry, in non-textile materials, linked to the industrial world: metals of the heavy industry, rubber, electric cable, economy papers and the marketing, brochures, and inorganic wastes such as aluminum cans and PET bottles. It also develops textile jewelry in noble metals such as silver and gold plated bronze.

Through her concept and work she has become an activist for peace, not only with the generation of remunerated work for artisans who make their work handcrafted plastic arts, with great dedication of time in each work, if not, with the projects is Weaving is Peace from 1996 to 1999, with the work Entrelazadas, Bandera Colombiana de Paz (Colombian Banner of Peace), which she has been working on since 2006. the Lucio Colombo children's project, which she has been working on since 2002.

The work- bandera Entrelazadas as a symbol of the intertwining of ideas, formed part of the the Havana Peace Accords, promoted by the Nobel Peace Prize, Juan Manuel Santos with his negotiating team. His wife, Maria Clemencia Rodríguez de Santos was a great champion of the project. For her initiative, the work was taken by the then president of Colombia to the Vatican, where Pope Francis blessed the peace in Colombia, putting his blessing on the hand on it.

At present, she is developing several parallel projects: basurORO, in which she works on her work and also teaches weaving to vulnerable communities. organic wastes converted into ribbons for interlacing; animalMAS, in which defends that component of the personality of animals that is not exactly instinctive; PIxEL, in which she makes fabrics in leather from flat in pixels, of the faces of characters that have been symbols of peace and conciliation between cultures.