About
BIO
"Some intelligences don't speak; they photosynthesize, root, and remember across geological time."
Elena Bajo (b. Madrid) is a Spanish-American, transdisciplinary artist and choreographer, a 2026 John Simon Guggenheim Fellow in Fine Arts for The Quantum Leaf Speaks in Ancient Tongues — a project on plant memory, quantum entanglement as an artistic principle, and ancestral/matrilineal Celtic knowledge systems, worked through Jacquard tapestry, sculptural assemblage, "Anarchoreographic" performance, and speculative film.
She received an MFA at University of the Arts London (UAL), Pharmacology degree at Universidad Complutense Madrid, Master in Architecture at ESARQ-UIC Barcelona, and studied Laban/Bartenieff movement technique at TanzFabrik Berlin. She is the founder of the S.L.A.B Project, an ecological art platform, located in Wonder Valley Californian desert and currently teaches Integrative Art Studies at Saas-Fee Summer Institute of Art. She divides her time between America and Europe.
By merging ancestral methods with transdisciplinary art practices, which combines sculpture, moving image, performance, ethnobotany, choreography, and poetry, Elena Bajo mine vibrant plant systems to discover their unique material forms and activate new forms of consciousness. Their art serves as a platform for researching and reviving ancestral ethnobotanical knowledge, engaging with environmental justice issues, and fostering collective empowerment through artistic expression and community collaboration. Elena's diverse artistic approach embodies a holistic exploration of ecology, history, and human connection to the non-human world.
Her artistic practice occurs at the intersection of anarchist thought, social ecology, and metaphysics, engaging ideas of nature, and the body as a political and social entity questioning its relationship to ecologies of capital. She works both individually and collectively, using a post-disciplinary approach choreography, sculpture, performance, architecture, life sciences, text and video. Concept-generated and research-based is concerned with the ecological, social, and political dimensions of everyday spaces, the strategies to conceptualize resistance, the poetics of ideologies, and the relationship between temporalities and subjectivities. Exhibition spaces become art studios or laboratories, where an experimental, itinerant, site-specific performed work unfolds, generating improvised actions and choreographed movements. The resulting works are both conceptual and poetic, in the sense they are linked to cognitive labor; a labor that cannot be valued and has no limits as it is the condition of precarious work in today’s neoliberal economy generated amidst ecosophical moments of fracture and repositioning, in an attempt to entertain fissures in a world of crystallized sensibility.
After obtaining a degree in Pharmacology from the Complutense University in Madrid, (Spain) she received an MA in Genetic Architecture from ESARQ, School of Architecture at International University of Catalunya, Barcelona (Spain) and an MA in Fine Arts from Central Saint Martins School of Art, University of Arts, London (UK). She has studied Laban / Bartenieff Movement Principles with Eva Blaschke, Christel Büche, and Jan Burkhardt at TanzFabrik, Center for Contemporary Dance, Berlin She was a co-founder of the temporary art project EXHIBITION 211, in New York. She has taught and lectured at Saas-Fee Summer Institute of Art, Berlin; Goldsmith’s College, London; Rhode Island School of Design, RISD, Providence; and Sheffield Hallam University, Sheffield among other institutions.
She has exhibited and performed among others at Socrates Sculpture Park, NY, US; Priska Pasquer, Paris, FR; Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts Project Space, New York, US; Movement Research, New York, US; C Room 1, Priska Pasquer, Cologne, Germany; A Performance Affair, APA, Brussels, Belgium. Los Angeles Municipal Gallery, Los Angeles, US; Blue Project Foundation, Barcelona; Parallel Oaxaca, Mexico; Garcia Galeria, Madrid; Annex14, Zurich, Switzerland; Kunsthalle Sao Paulo, Brazil; Stacion, Pristina, Kosovo; Artium Museum of Contemporary Art, Vitoria, Spain; and group shows at 44th Salon Nacional de Artistas, Pereira, Colombia; Kai 10 Arthena Foundation, Dusseldorf; David Roberts Foundation. London; La Casa Encendida, Madrid; 3rd Mardin Biennial, Turkey, Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen, Denmark; Performa Biennial, NY; Sculpture Center, NY; Perform now, LA; Dry Lake Desert, California and the dunes of the Sahara Desert, Morocco. Awarded residencies at LMCC Governors Island, NY US; NARS studio Relief Award; Skowhegan, Maine; ISCP, in New York; Ratti Foundation in Como, Italy; Gabriel Orozco Workshop Fellowship, Botin Foundation, Spain; Goldrausch in Berlin, Germany. She has recently received a Foundation for Contemporary Arts grant award; and in 2017 she received the Audemars Piguet award, ArcoMadrid, and the Botin Foundation International Visual Arts Grant award. .