Mi casa, mi cuerpo – My house, my body
2026 –
Mi Casa, Mi Cuerpo is a project that explores the house in all its complexity and paradoxes: both an intimate space and a social stage, an extension of the body and an organism that inhabits us. It starts from the idea that the home is never a fixed or entirely stable place, but a shifting construction, shaped by memory, desire, and social structures. Inspired by The Wizard of Oz and Salman Rushdie’s The Auction of the Red Shoes, I examine what it truly means to inhabit a space. Why, like Dorothy, return to an original place, even when it seems empty, banal, or illusory? How do the body and the home influence each other, support one another, and transform one another? In this project, the house is both tangible and fictional, concrete and metaphorical, while the body becomes a space where contradictions, hopes, and ruptures are made visible.
Dorothy’s red shoes in The Wizard of Oz embody the tension between journey and return, the endless quest to understand what “home” really means: instruments of movement, reservoirs of memory, and metaphors of dwelling—a home we carry with us and that carries us, a home that inhabits us. In Salman Rushdie’s The Auction of the Red Shoes, they symbolize the fragility and uncertainty of the very concept of home: a place we seek to inhabit, which shapes and transforms us, yet remains forever elusive. My personal experience as a Mexican woman living in France resonates with this idea: exile and uprooting turn the home into a polymorphic, unstable space, where profound identity disjunctions emerge. The home reveals itself as a hydra: simultaneously protective and constraining, reassuring and unsettling.
The contemporary house is a site of tensions. As a refuge and a second skin for the body, a façade and a mirror for projections, it is also a space of ambivalence where memories and regrets, desires and constraints, protection and surveillance coexist. It houses intimacy while fragmenting it. Shaped by social, economic, and cultural experience, it expresses both values and the limits of a world saturated with signs.
At the heart of this project, the house and the body meet and transform each other. The boundaries between them blur, portraying both home and subject as unstable, shifting spaces, terrains of disjunction and experiences of strangeness. Each sculpture becomes a poetic hybrid, where the intimate and the collective, the real and the fictional, intersect and transform.
The central idea is to stage deconstructed and recomposed bodies interacting with an archetypal gabled house. These bodies take varied forms: phallic, collapsing masses, cloud-like structures pierced with windows, flames, or organic shapes. Some ambiguous, childlike silhouettes appear to literally straddle the roof, blurring the line between playfulness, unease, and bodily tension. Legs, adorned with shoes reminiscent of Dorothy’s or children’s socks, provide social and gendered markers, enhancing the grotesque and poetic hybridization of the ensemble.
53x 34 x 24 cm
© Estefania Bouchot
The suicidals
2026 –Extension of the project Mi Casa, Mi Cuerpo
This series continues my exploration of the body and domestic space, initiated in Mi Casa, Mi Cuerpo, while venturing into liminal spaces: death, the beyond, and falling. The suspended figures, sometimes isolated, sometimes grouped, embody the moment between familiarity and vertigo, between the grounding of home and the call of the unknown.
Inspired by the loss of my father, the works approach suicide not as a taboo, but as an act of resistance—an action both incomprehensible and profoundly real. It becomes a metaphor for radical freedom, a way of defying the inevitable. The series seeks to apprehend death and what comes after, absence and memory, everything suspended in between, transforming tragedy into a contemplative space where fragility and strength coexist.
In these pieces, home and body coexist within a micro-universe of strange, overwhelming forms, echoing suicidal thoughts, the idea of death, and the impossibility of ever sharing time again with those who have left us. Tension permeates each work, between grounding and vertigo, familiarity and mystery, the lived and the elusive. They constitute a silent yet vibrant homage, a bridge between the visible and the invisible, between what no longer exists, what remains, and what is becoming. Human fragility, acts of remembrance, and the contained power of the extreme transform into sculptural matter, in suspended figures oscillating between unease, poetry, and strangeness.
Everyday Chimeras
2023 –These works take the form of fantastic entities shaped by diverse influences, including Mexican popular culture. They give rise to hybrid figures where elements of everyday life mingle with imagination, organic and bodily forms. Clouds, hearts, ex-votos, animals, and clowns coexist with images drawn from dreams and nightmares.
The earliest works in this series, created in ceramics, mark a starting point in my sculptural practice and opened the research I continue today. They emerge from a process of free associations, nourished by the random forms and elements that surround me in daily life. This intuitive gesture becomes a way to tame anxiety and transform the ordinary into fictional material.
Creation thus approaches an almost automatic process, where the inner life manifests through images reminiscent of magical realism. Each piece develops as an autonomous micro-universe, with its own formal and symbolic logic.
These anthropomorphic forms convey the absurdity and, at times, the discomfort of an unstable everyday life. They capture emotional states in a strangeness that is both delicate and poetic, infused with a humor that borders on the grotesque.
46 x 34.5 x 12 cm
stoneware, acrylic, varnish,
30 x 26 x 20.5 cm.
Like a Coral Anchored in the Void
2025
Included in the solo exhibition Inhabiting Our Ghosts
Les coraux, bien que fixés au fond marin, semblent paradoxalement ancrés dans un environnement en perpétuel mouvement. Organismes vivants formant leur propre architecture, ils sont à la fois structure et abri, corps et maison. Cette immobilité, évoquée par la matière céramique et la condition statique des sculptures, nous confronte à l’angoisse du possible, à la liberté et au hasard, tout en nous invitant à une forme d’acceptation lucide face à ce qui nous dépasse.
Pourtant, au-delà de cette fixité, le corail incarne également la fragilité et l’impermanence. Exposé aux courants, aux variations, à l’érosion, il demeure vulnérable. Ces qualités se manifestent à travers des formes extravagantes, des couleurs vibrantes et des traits organiques. Elles rappellent ce qui persiste dans l’univers du possible : ce qui n’est pas encore advenu, suspendu dans une temporalité incertaine — là où tout reste à se transformer.
À travers l’idée du vide, matérialisée par des silhouettes creuses et des interstices délicats mêlés à des éléments figuratifs humains, j’explore une notion qui symbolise à la fois l’absence et le potentiel infini. Ce vide n’est pas seulement une lacune, mais un champ de toutes les possibilités : un espace où l’on peut rêver, s’échapper, mais aussi se perdre, un espace à la fois refuge et menace. Il devient un lieu à habiter, non pas malgré son instabilité, mais avec elle.
Dans cette quête, je tente d’accepter l’ambiguïté inhérente à ces tensions : l’oscillation entre le vide et le plein, l’être et le néant, l’immobilité et le mouvement. Il ne s’agit plus de chercher un ancrage stable, mais d’apprendre à s’ancrer dans l’impermanence elle-même, d’y trouver une forme de foyer mouvant. Ces pièces cherchent à célébrer l’absurde, comme une révolte face à la quête incessante de sens, et à reconnaître notre condition de vacillation constante, à l’image d’un corail ancré dans un vide.
44 x 20 x 25 cm
70 x 36 x 36 cm
67 x 40 x 40 cm
Inhabiting Our Ghosts
2025
Galerie Artivistas, Paris
As a foreigner, I discovered that remaining true to oneself in an unfamiliar context becomes a quest full of doubt and self-questioning. Arriving in France as a young woman barely an adult, coming from Mexico, in a country carrying so much weight in our collective unconscious, triggered an internal spiral. I have always avoided speaking of identity, roots, or anchoring, preferring instead to embrace a conception of freedom in which the field of becoming is always open before us.
Yet an unexpected shift occurred when I finally became aware of my own foreign body, an entity floating in its persistent difference. Here, the ghost represents this image of oneself that, due to the gap between the individual and their existence, becomes a blurred, elusive figure. At times, one can feel not fully alive, caught in the paradox of being experienced as dead.
The works in this exhibition invite us to navigate the ambivalence of desire: that eternally unsatisfied, unfinished longing. They explore the confrontation with the absurd and with freedom, and the ways in which one can become lost in a self-imaginary shaped by the pursuit of individual authenticity or imposed by social norms, which carry their own fantasies. Through the metaphor of the specter, embodying emptiness, hollow silhouettes and fragile interstices take shape.
I invite you to immerse yourself in this notion, which paradoxically symbolizes both absence and infinite potential. This void is not simply a gap, but a space of all possibilities: a place to dream, to escape, but also to lose oneself. In this context, we face an ontological void, where freedom can ultimately paralyze us. As Kierkegaard wrote, the aesthetic individual is caught in the anxiety of a free and absurd existence, a state of perpetual suspension, a specter where artistic experience becomes a way to anchor oneself in impermanence, in the absence of choice, in an endless quest for meaning that will never be fully realized.
Yet it is precisely in this liminal space, where mystery reveals itself in a magical form, that the charm of the unknown resides, in all that could be. It is a place where one inhabits possibility.
The idea of a fragmented, displaced, vulnerable being gradually nourished the singular universe in which I have since immersed myself. The term “ghost” resonates on multiple levels here. Doubling, not as disjunction but as multiplicity of the self, proved to be a home where I could embody various versions of myself. In this way, I found a way to liberate myself from myself, from this marginal body. Through my works, with organic forms and vibrant colors, I attempt to bring my ghosts to life and call them to gather. If we are to remain forever ghosts of ourselves, then let us honor them, as we honor our dead, with humor and a spirit of celebration, at least for today. Long live the ghosts!
73 x 42 x 40 cm
Lilicia, 2025, stoneware with engobe and glaze, 79 x 25 x 25 cm
In the foreground :
Komi, 2024, stoneware with engobe and glaze, 46x30x25
Stoneware, lacquer
45 x 35 x 35 cm
28 x 43 x 32 cm
25 x 26 x 20.5 cm
Masks 2015 – 2020
Drawings 2015 – 2020
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