María-Elena Pombo (Fragmentario)

Born in Caracas, Venezuela (1988). Based in Brooklyn, USA since 2011.

Working under the moniker Fragmentario since 2016, María-Elena Pombo is best known for her work using avocado-seeds gathered by local restaurant-workers, and water provided by individuals around the world. A framework to create a participatory practice.

She recontextualizes and transforms these avocado seeds into speculative propositions that reimagine them as a material to dye fabric, make clay, plastic, leather, glass, electricity, and fuel for vehicles. With these explorations, she has created a body of work spanning installation, performance, video, conceptual fashion, and more. Her research-centered practice draws from many disciplines, from history, science, and linguistics, and seeks to provoke conversations around colonization, geopolitics, migration, anthropocentrism, and globalization.

Besides avocado-seeds and water, she uses other ubiquitous materials that are recontextualized and transformed by using vernacular and experimental processes. From onion skins, seaweed, oyster shells, deadstock silk, found objects, and more. A strategy to engage heterogeneous actors in the agriculture, restaurant, construction, and waste-management industries to co-imagine and co-create post-extractivism realities.

Pombo won the 2021 London Design Biennale’s Theme Award. Her work has been exhibited at Somerset House (London, UK), A/D/O (Brooklyn, USA), SXSW (Austin, USA), Mana Contemporary (Jersey City, USA), Yamamoto Seika (Osaka, Japan), La Guarimba Film Festival (Amantea, Italy), among others across the USA, Europe and Japan. She has won grants from New York Foundation for the Arts, New York Restoration Project, National Onion Association, among others. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, Forbes, The Financial Times and included in the book "True Colors: World Masters of Natural Dyes and Pigments."

Pombo has worked as faculty at Parsons School of Design, and as guest lecturer at Brooklyn Botanic Garden, New York Botanical Garden and other traditional and unorthodox spaces across the USA, Europe and Japan.

You can see her CV here.

Contact

email: info@fragmentario.co

instagram: @fragmentario_