# Aimée Joaristi

Aimée Joaristi (born 24 August 1957) is a multidisciplinary Cuban artist. Her works encompass painting, installation, video art, photography, and performance.
Joaristi's work has been featured in individual and collective exhibitions, and is held in public and private collections in Cuba, Chile, Latvia, Spain, Costa Rica, France, Mexico, and the United States.

## Biography

Joaristi was born in Havana, Cuba, and lived there with her family until the Cuban Revolution of 1959. In response to civil unrest, her family moved to Miami when Joaristi was three years old. The family later moved to Madrid, Spain, the home of her paternal grandparents and maternal great-grandparents.
While living in Madrid, Joaristi visited museums and galleries with her uncle, and traveled with her parents in Europe. She became interested in the work of Salvador Dalí, which later influenced the surrealist of her work. At the age of 17, she began studying interior architecture in Madrid. At the age of 20, she began the study of graphic design at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City.
She worked in Milan in the fashion industry Prêt-à-porter and as an interior designer, and later opened an architecture and interior design studio in Costa Rica.
In 2008, she began focusing solely on her art.
Since 2020, she has been working on a project called "Cayados," which comprises 13 ceramic sculpted canes and a video art piece. The inspiration for this project came after Joaristi experienced a spinal injury at the beginning of 2020.
She has permanent collections at Museo de Artes Decorativas y Diseño (Latvia), Arte Al Límite (Chile), Kendall Art Center (United States), Museo Wifredo Lam (Cuba), Museo La Neomudéjar (Spain), and Museo Zapadores (Spain).

## Awards and recognition

Joaristi won the International Emerging Artist Award (IEAA) in 2016 and Contemporary Art Curator Magazine's the Artist of the Future Award in 2020. She was selected for the following collections: Art and Fashion, Britain, “La Fiesta del Laberinto” for textile design (2013); seven consecutive times for the Pop and Op Surrealism collection at the Saatchi Gallery (2013); and foulards by Ostinelli Seta (2014). Among her commissioned works is "The End of the Beginning" (2015, Saatchi Gallery).

## Featured art projects
### Tres cruces (2018)

This work recounts a tragic event that occurred in Costa Rica on April 6, 1986, when seven women were raped and murdered after participating in a pilgrimage activity in La Cruz de Alajuelita. The criminal case of La Cruz de Alajuelita has not been clarified to date, nor has anyone been publicly prosecuted in connection to the crimes. For this work, Joaristi reflects on the connection between the languages of her previous work and how abstraction and landscape guide the viewer through the geography of the event.
   …The place was very close to me both because of its location in the Cerros de San Miguel of Escazú where I live, and because it is the destination for morning walks where I start my day. Without further ado, and in search of images (...) to articulate this project, I threw myself voraciously on the mountain, armed with a camera, a cane, and water. I went up without thinking about the effort. I only thought about the meaning I should give to this fact and how to "appropriate" a tragic moment, ruled by the pain of others, to translate that experience through the language of art.
Tres Cruces is a video installation complemented with painting and photography, mixing traditional art and technology. It is made up of three scenes or spaces that seek to show the gender violence that surrounded this event, and is accompanied by video art that shows the current crime scene.
This work was exhibited at the Museo C.A.V. La Neo-Mudejar in Madrid.

### Manifesto Público (2019)

This work addresses the struggle to eradicate inequality and machismo from society, and seeks a reconstruction of women outside of socially patriarchal prejudices and stigmas. Public Manifesto is a work of space appropriation in which the artist seeks to de-sexualize and naturalize women from the normality of the genitals without resorting to a reproduction attached to reality but by making an explicit social reference. This work has been exhibited in various spaces around the world and has caused various reactions according to the culture and normalization of sexuality in countries such as Cuba, Japan, Spain, Italy, Costa Rica, the United States and South Africa.

## Books

Joaristi's published works include:
* Silencios y gritos (2015)
* The Best of 2016: International Emerging Artists (2016)
* Entre Siglos: Arte Contemporáneo de Centroamérica y Panamá (2016)
* Arte Al Límite (2017)
* The First Berliner Art Book (2017)
* Important World Artists (2017)
* Lenguaje Sucio (2019)