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The biology of the body can be transformed without its underlying genetic code ever changing. Carolina Amaya (b. Colombia, lives and works in Berlin) researches the integumentary system, primarily skin and hair, as interfaces that can be changed. Can memory be carried by skin and hair? Cultural memory, inherited belief, and territorial histories are continuously encoded, displaced, and reconfigured there, transforming through care, attention, and practice, just as the body itself does.
The drawings in Archives of Transmission investigate the body as a system of transmission. Moving between skin, hair, follicles, ectoderm, and imagined biological structures, they explore how experience, memory, and inherited information might become materially inscribed in the body. Rather than representing anatomy, the drawings register what exists within the body but does not yet have an image, where biological processes entangle with cultural, ancestral, and environmental forms of transmission.
Her mixed-media works on Colombian jute and linen treat skin as a living archive, scars, wrinkles, pigmentation, hair, inflammation, and wounds held as records of time and environment. The series draws on a precise biological fact: skin and brain originate from the same embryonic tissue, the ectoderm, so that thought, emotion, and matter remain, from the body's very formation, inseparable. Through ink, ceramic elements, and hand-stitched jute, the textiles carry territorial and cultural memory, while ceramic fragments emerge as bodily extensions, traces, scars, and sensory forms, small objects a viewer can approach closely, at the scale of touch rather than spectacle.
In Mayinias Altar, the body takes hybrid form in clay: human and animal fused into one, each sculpture standing around 30 centimetres, close enough to a viewer's own scale to feel less like a monument and more like a presence in the room. Gesture, posture, humour, sensuality, and material tension hold the memory of what a body has lived and inherited, proposing it as a mutable territory where that inheritance is reconfigured.
In the participatory project The Uncollectible Archive — Transmission, fiber is braided and passed hand to hand. Memory moves as gesture, repeated, learned, altered, as it travels from one body to the next.
Across these works, biology, inheritance, and emotional life continually change and entangle. What remains, and what changes, in the passing on, is the question the work returns to.