Carlos Lalvay Estrada is a visual artist and founder of the Pica project, born in Ecuador and based in Genoa. The Pica project was established in Genoa in 2012.
My practice develops from an autobiographical investigation into memory, identity, and the concept of belonging. I use repeated gestures, error, and waiting as tools for reflection and as a method to construct visual and installation-based forms rooted in lived time and the affective layering of experience.I work with fragile and process-based materials — paper, thread, rope, photosensitive emulsions — that react to time, light, and touch. Cyanotype, for example, is a technique I use as a meditative and temporal practice, in which exposure to light becomes a performative act and an imprinted memory. I record, sew, intertwine, repeat gestures that become devices for emotional recording and silent resistance.My methodology is based on slow action, manual labor, and the construction of images that oscillate between the personal and the collective, between abstraction and narration.The work is generated in time and space, often activated by intimate or shared rituals, in which the audience or loved ones become witnesses, co-authors, or implicit recipients.Through this practice, I seek to transform memory into matter, experience into form, and trauma into a shareable language. Each project is an attempt to map affections, places, and absences, restoring visibility to that which resists in a non-linear, marginal, but deeply rooted way.
In this new series of cyanotypes, I explore the possibility of pushing the technique beyond its inherent limits. An almost physiological urgency has led me to transcend the traditional boundaries of the medium, venturing into a space that remains unexplored for me.
In a sort of alchemical marriage between time, matter, and gesture, the paper almost miraculously transforms into a threshold and a revealing surface of uncoded, unbounded, and layered spaces.
The paper thus becomes a three-dimensional body that, through cutouts, folds, and new modes of interacting with space, emancipates itself from the wall, surpasses its margins, and seeks new forms of existence.In a historical moment where borders and territories appear increasingly rigidly defined, I feel the need to imagine a possible escape, a symbolic crossing: to go “más allá de los límites”.A significant precedent in this journey was the creation of a 9 by 3 meter mural in Cagliari, entirely made using the cyanotype technique. This work, conceived for a public space, represented a first concrete step in pushing the technique beyond traditional limits, opening new possibilities for interaction with space and audience.
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