Emilia Estrada (b. Córdoba, Argentina, 1989) is an artist and researcher who lives and works in Rio de Janeiro. Engaging with notions of displacement and occupation, her practice confronts the ways in which power is inscribed in archives and in representations of space. By probing the gaps and omissions of official records, Estrada excavates buried memories and proposes alternative readings of hegemonic historical narratives. For the artist, archives are not merely neutral repositories of information that contribute to the production of history, but contested fields where remembrance and erasure intertwine, revealing structures of  domination.

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Working primarily with drawing, installation, and archival research, Estrada investigates terrestrial and celestial cartographies as instruments of power that organize and naturalize arbitrary borders, legitimizing processes of exploitation and territorial appropriation. By articulating poetic, iconographic, and archival elements, the artist constructs speculative mappings that make visible the arbitrariness of historiography and the symbolic systems that shape territorial imaginaries. In her works, cartography is not reinvented but unmasked: what presents itself as a descriptive tool reveals itself to be a fiction shaped by vested interests - and it is within this contaminated terrain, where documentation and imagination have always intermingled, that her practice operates. Here, Estrada brings together historical documents, iconographic archives, and mythologies, weaving them into drawings and installations that destabilize inherited narratives and fabulate new territorial imaginaries.

 

In recent investigations, the artist turns her gaze to the sky and takes the Moon as a surface of projection, where science, mythology, and colonial desire converge. Celestial cartography -  its reliefs, compositions, and nomenclatures - is analyzed as a mirror of terrestrial imperial projects, revealing how science, mythology, and fiction intertwine in aspirations of possession and control. Her visual vocabulary interlaces references from colonial heraldry and science fiction imaginaries, expanding the possibilities of cartographic imagination.

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