Lena Becerra

Art

2 November 2026

Art

Lena Becerra

2 November 2026

Q: Why are you particularly interested in hybrid and in-between forms, instead of entirely fictional organisms?  

A: I think I’m interested in hybrid forms precisely because they are not entirely fictional. They contain something we recognize (an organ, a root, an exoskeleton, a limb, a vascular system) but these references are displaced or recombined in ways that make them difficult to classify.

That ambiguity is important to me. I’m interested in the moment when something stops being clearly human, animal, vegetal, or technological, and instead exists somewhere between those categories. I don’t necessarily want to invent a completely new organism; I’m more interested in destabilizing the boundaries through which we understand existing ones.

There is also something very bodily about recognition. Sometimes you look at one of these forms and feel that you know what it is before you can actually name it. I’m interested in that gap between recognition and language, because it allows the work to be encountered through memory, intuition, attraction, or discomfort before it becomes something rationally understood.

Q: What draws you to silicone, glass, and other materials associated with the body, medicine, or laboratory environments?  

A: I’m drawn to materials that already carry a certain bodily ambiguity. Silicone is particularly important to me because of its relationship to the prosthetic human body. It is compatible with the skin and can be incorporated into the body without necessarily being rejected or recognized as entirely external. At the same time, it belongs to plastic surgery, medical prosthetics, but also to cinematic special effects, where it is used to simulate skin, wounds, organs, and bodily transformations. I find this contradiction fascinating: a completely synthetic material that can become incredibly intimate with the body, or even be perceived as part of it.

There is also something strange about its temporality. Unlike the organic body, silicone does not decompose in the same way. I’m interested in this tension between a body that is constantly transforming and decaying and a prosthetic material that resists that process, the almost impossible condition of something that is not allowed to rot.

Glass carries a different but related ambiguity. It can appear extremely fragile and organic, almost like an organ or a membrane, while at the same time belonging to laboratories, scientific instruments, preservation, and containment. I’m particularly interested in how glass can become both a body and the vessel containing that body: something that allows you to look inside while simultaneously separating you from what it contains.

Together with metal, tubing, fluids, pumps, and membranes, these materials allow me to construct bodies that never fully stabilize as organic or artificial, living or inert.

"I’m less interested in reproducing medical or laboratory aesthetics than in using the contradictions already embedded in these materials to imagine prosthetic anatomies: bodies in which what is foreign, artificial, or technological has become inseparable from what we perceive as organic."

Q: Are there materials you deliberately work with because they resist or challenge your initial intentions for the work?  

A: My research is very process-oriented, so material research is fundamental to the way I work. Glass and silicone in particular, but also metal, constantly challenge the ideas I bring into the making process.

Glass is probably the most magical material for me in this sense. I bring a lot of intention to what I make, but I also have to allow the material to surprise me. Heat, gravity, timing, movement, and chance are always participating in the process. You are never fully in control of the result.

I find that challenging but also incredibly refreshing. Sometimes the material produces a morphology that I could never have designed beforehand, and that accident becomes much more interesting than my original intention. I like thinking of making less as imposing a form onto a material and more as a negotiation with it.

Q: How does technology change our understanding of nature?  

A: I think technology reveals how unstable the category of “nature” has always been. We often imagine nature and technology as opposites, but our bodies and environments have always been entangled with tools, infrastructures, medicines, machines, and other species.

What interests me is what happens when technology stops being understood only as something external that humans impose on nature. A pump can become a heart, tubing can become vasculature, a sensor can behave like a sensory organ. In my installations, soft technological systems often perform very basic biological gestures: circulating, breathing, sensing, leaking, responding.

At the same time, technologies such as biotechnology, artificial intelligence, prosthetics, and reproductive technologies increasingly complicate the boundaries of what we call natural, artificial, living, or non-living. For me, this doesn’t mean that technology replaces nature. It makes visible that these categories were perhaps never as separate as we imagined.  

Q: You work with ideas associated with xenofeminism. What aspects of this theoretical framework have actually changed the way you make art, not only the way you talk or think about your work?  

A: One of the things that attracted me to xenofeminism was its refusal to treat nature as something pure, fixed. The idea that what we call “natural” can be questioned, transformed, and technologically mediated has been very important to my practice.

But this has also affected how I physically make work. Instead of trying to represent an idealized organic body, I construct bodies through combinations of synthetic and organic materials, machines, prosthetic systems, fluids, glass, silicone, and metal. I’m interested in bodies that are dependent on other bodies and systems in order to function.

It has also made me think differently about ideas of autonomy. My sculptures are rarely self-contained objects. They depend on pumps, tubes, reservoirs, electricity, humidity, other sculptures, sometimes performers or visitors. I think this interdependence is important. Instead of imagining the body as an autonomous and finished entity, I’m interested in the body as something porous, technologically mediated, and continuously constituted through its relationships with other beings.

Q: What is the question you are most frequently asked about your work that you feel misses the point or frames your practice in the wrong way?   

A: The least interesting question for me is probably when someone immediately asks for an explanation of what the work “means,” without first trying to establish their own connection with it.

I think this happens quite often outside artistic contexts because we are increasingly accustomed to instant and literal images. When something requires decoding, imagination, or a more sensory form of attention, people can feel challenged by it. But I don’t really want my work to be “understood” in a single, rational sense.

I’ve also stopped answering purely technical questions about how I made something when they become the main focus of the encounter. Of course technique is important to my practice, but knowing exactly how a pump works or how a glass form was fabricated doesn’t necessarily bring you closer to what the work is doing.

What I enjoy most is when someone tells me what the work made them remember or feel. Often people describe associations from their own lives that are uncannily close to experiences, memories, or images that were present in my subconscious while making the work, even though they could never have known that.

For me, that is one of the most powerful things art can do: create a connection between experiences that are otherwise completely private. If a work can trigger a question, a memory, an attraction, a discomfort, or a feeling that belongs entirely to the person encountering it, then something meaningful has happened.  

Q: Is there something in your practice that you feel could only have emerged in Berlin, and perhaps would not have developed in the same way in another city?  

A: For me, it might actually be the other way around. I often felt slightly out of place in some of the other countries and cities where I lived. When I arrived in Berlin, the practice I was already developing suddenly felt very welcomed.

I hesitate to say “understood,” because being understood in a completely logical or rational sense is quite far from what I want from anything poetic. It was more a feeling of finding a family of like-minded people and an environment where experimentation, strangeness, and uncertainty did not need to be justified immediately.

There is also an incredible energy here of people feeling the urgency to make things and share them: art, music, performances, spaces, collaborations, experiments. Being surrounded by that has been enormously inspiring and reassuring. Berlin didn’t necessarily create something “new” in my practice, but it gave it an ecosystem in which it could become more unapologetically itself.