Pedro Riofrío

Pedro Riofrío (b. 1996, Quito, Ecuador) is a visual artist, musician, and researcher living and working between Europe and Latin America. His practice moves across biomaterials, technological experimentation, sculpture, and the physicality of sound, exploring interconnectedness, transformation, and the cyclical nature of life. Informed by a perspective shaped between different territories and cultures, his work approaches matter not as something inert, but as an active presence: something that carries time, memory, resonance, and the possibility of becoming something else.

At the core of his practice is an interest in the origins and transformations of matter, and in the shared material condition that connects human, vegetal, animal, fungal, and mineral bodies. Rather than understanding these forms through fixed hierarchies, Riofrío approaches them as participants in a rhizomatic system of exchanges, where matter continuously moves, resonates, decays, regenerates, and transforms. What matters to him is the consciousness of the soul of matter through its transformation: the possibility of encountering something beyond the visible form of a material precisely by witnessing what it can become.

“I am not searching for the truth of things, nor am I trying to justify anything. I am interested in offering a new poetry, bringing into view what - I believe - is already evident.” Through scientific processes, artistic intuition, sound, and collaborations with other species and materials, Riofrío constructs situations in which different narratives can coexist. His pursuit of the transcendent lies not in reaching a fixed image or conclusion, but in transformation itself: in creating experiences that make perceptible the invisible relationships already unfolding between bodies, environments, histories, and forms of life.

Riofrío has exhibited and developed projects internationally across Belgium, France, the United States, Mexico, and Ecuador. Recent exhibitions and presentations include SOIL Artist-Run Gallery, Seattle (USA); Galería N.A.S.A.L., Mexico City (Mexico); Le Botanique and the Musical Instruments Museum / Ars Musica, Brussels (Belgium); Château d'Eau, Bourges, and La Chartreuse, Villeneuve-lès-Avignon (France); and Punto Rojo, Quito (Ecuador). His practice has also developed through research and production residencies in Brussels, France, Ecuador, Mexico, and the United States, including projects at L'Échangeur²² in Saint-Laurent-des-Arbres, La Chartreuse in Villeneuve-lès-Avignon, and KULT XL Ateliers in Brussels. In 2023, he received the Prix de la Ville de Bruxelles upon completing his Master's degree in Sculpture at the Académie royale des Beaux-Arts de Bruxelles (ARBA-ESA). His ongoing research has also been supported by institutions and programs including the Fonds de la Recherche en Art (FRArt/FNRS), Wallonie-Bruxelles International, and the Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles.