C+CU: Narratives of Energy Sway, Gropius Bau, 2022 Installation

Michelle-Marie Letelier (she/them) is a Chilean artist based in Berlin. Reverberating her early life in the Atacama Desert; between the Andes Mountains and the Pacific Ocean, her multidisciplinary work orchestrates transformations of so-called ‘natural resources’, alongside extensive wide-ranging, interdisciplinary research into the sea-landscapes where their exploitation and speculation take place. Through her work, she blends different epochs, regions and societies, examining political-economic, historical and cultural aspects. Since establishing in Berlin in 2007, she has been particularly invested in examining coal, copper, saltpetre, wind, salmon and, more recently, slime, in order to create a poetic work applying their properties — such as electrical conductivity, crystallisation, agency and plasticity. In her practice, she experiments with chemical and physical transformation processes that produce the artworks themselves, as well as their poiesis, beyond the extractive industry and its forms of control. Letelier graduated from the Universidad Católica de Chile and has participated in Organismo | Art in Applied Critical Ecologies study program (2024, TBA21, Madrid), Goldrausch Künstlerinnenprojekt art IT (2010, Berlin) and was a guest student in the Experimental Media Design studies at the University of Arts in Berlin (2007-2008). Her work has been shown internationally in biennials, galleries, museums and institutions, among others: Kunstmuseum St. Gallen (CH); Gropius-Bau (Berlin); Kunstmuseum Bonn; Screen City Biennial 2019 (Stavanger); Bienal Sur 2017 (Buenos Aires); El Museo de Los Sures (New York); Kunsthall 3,14 (Bergen); Museo de la Solidaridad Salvador Allende (Santiago); Errant Bodies (Berlin); Museum of Contemporary Art (Santiago); Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes (Santiago) and Kommunale Galerie Charlottenburg (Berlin). She has been a resident at ISCP (NYC, 2014), USF (Bergen, 2017), Kunstnerhuset (Svolvær, 2018), Magallanes2020 (Punta Arenas, 2018), ISLA (Antofagasta, 2018); Troms fylkeskultursenter (Tromsø, 2019); Prater Digital (online, 2021); Resonancias (Punta Arenas, 2021); Atelier Mondial (Basel, 2023); The Blue Cabin (Vancouver, 2023); Læsø AiR (Læsø, 2023) and TaDA (Arbon, 2025).