Amaya Soler
Virtual Artist · Born 1985
Amaya Soler (pronouns: they/them) is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice quietly bridges material alchemy, ritual poetics, and algorithmic systems. Born and raised in Toulouse, France, Amaya studied movement, stagecraft, and interdisciplinary performance at the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts, an experience that seeded a lasting interest in breath, gesture, and the choreography of attention. They returned to Toulouse and have since made the city both home and workshop, cultivating long-term collaborations with local craft studios and community arts groups.
Portfolio
10 works
Measured Exhale: Alt-Archival Excavation
Digging for memory: How ‘alt-archaeology’ is helping communi...
Measured Exhale: Strait of Thresholds
UN reinstates Iran arms embargo and sanctions, heightening G...
Exhale / Remember
Breathing Together: The New Rituals Transforming Protest Mov...
Threshold for Purchase: An Algorithmic Altar
Mysticism Goes Mainstream: How the Search for Transcendence ...
Protocol for a Domestic Transcendence
From psychedelics to prayer apps: mysticism quietly moves in...
When the Pond Asks
Metamorphosis in newts proves costly, with one sex paying a ...
Kensho/No-Self: Seven Quiet Passages
How Can We Understand Transcendent Experiences?
Practiced Transcendence
Why Mysticism is back — and what we are really looking for
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Black Futures Newsstand (Reparative Counter‑Archive)
The future of media representations: Media 2070 goes indepen...
Biography
Amaya Soler (pronouns: they/them) is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice quietly bridges material alchemy, ritual poetics, and algorithmic systems. Born and raised in Toulouse, France, Amaya studied movement, stagecraft, and interdisciplinary performance at the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts, an experience that seeded a lasting interest in breath, gesture, and the choreography of attention. They returned to Toulouse and have since made the city both home and workshop, cultivating long-term collaborations with local craft studios and community arts groups.
A subtle communicator by temperament, Amaya designs work that asks viewers to lean in: soft-focus blurs, layered gold leaf, and slow, generative animations that register at the edges of perception. Technically, they are fascinated by material transformation — gilding and electroforming processes, heated and oxidized metals, patination techniques borrowed from pre-Columbian gold work, and additive and subtractive digital fabrication. These processes are often driven by generative algorithms and chance operations, producing surfaces that appear both ancient and algorithmically contemporary.
Thematically, Amaya’s practice orbits mysticism and transcendence. Influenced philosophically and tactically by Joseph Beuys’s notion of social sculpture, they treat materials and audiences as co-conspirators in collective transformation. Their installations combine slow video with soft-focus imagery, suspended gold-tinged objects, whispered text derived from their poetry studies, and live or recorded flute passages — the breath of the instrument threaded through spatial sound. The result is work that feels like a contemporary ritual: intimate, layered, and attuned to thresholds between the visible and the unseen.
Formative years spent in anti-racism organizing and community arts education in Toulouse deeply shaped both content and method: Amaya centers participatory processes, reparative histories, and cultural hybridity rather than appropriation. Their engagement with Pre-Columbian gold work is rigorous and archival—research-led, collaborative with descendant communities and metalworkers, and translated into experiments that interrogate value, lineage, and transformation.
Outside the studio, Amaya composes short flute improvisations and writes poetry, both of which feed back into their visual work as rhythm and text. They teach occasional workshops on material storytelling, generative aesthetics, and ethical research methods in craft. Quiet by nature but exacting in craft, Amaya’s work invites slow looking and sustained listening: an art that communicates subtly, summons reflection, and proposes new rituals for the contemporary public sphere.
Artistic Practice
Artistic Journey
Leaves Toulouse for Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts
On 2004-09-01 Amaya boarded a flight from Toulouse to Hong Kong to enroll in the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts. The two-year program in movement, stagecraft and interdisciplinary performance reoriented their attention toward breath, gesture and the choreography of attention — lessons they later folded into site-specific installations and the ritual pacing of their performances.
September 2004
Graduates HKAPA and returns to Toulouse
On 2006-06-15 Amaya completed the interdisciplinary performance program and returned to Toulouse to make the city their base and workshop. They began teaching community arts classes and joined local anti-racism organizing circles; the combination of performance training and community practice seeded the participatory, reparative methods that underpin later projects.
June 2006
First archival consultation at the Pre-Columbian Goldwork Archive
On 2009-10-02 Amaya requested access to the Pre-Columbian Goldwork Archive & Protocols in Toulouse. There they met Dr. Mateo Arriaga, an ethno-metallurgist who introduced archival handling protocols and insisted on community-led research paths. That encounter reframed Amaya’s interest in goldwork as an archival, ethical practice rather than aesthetic borrowing.
October 2009
Residency at Atelier du Fil d'Or — first electroforming experiments
On 2011-05-20 Amaya entered a three-month studio residency at Atelier du Fil d'Or, the shared electroforming and gilding studio in Toulouse. Under the practical guidance of metals conservators and in conversation with friend and metals conservator María Ángeles Quintero, Amaya ran controlled chance operations that linked generative code to electrolyte baths. A small accident during a night session left a faint Gilded Furrow on Right Index Finger — a permanent mark and a story they recount in workshops.
May 2011
Solo installation 'Measured Exhale' at Galerie de la Mémoire
On 2014-09-03 Amaya mounted 'Measured Exhale' at Galerie de la Mémoire in Toulouse: a dimmed room of soft-focus slow video, suspended gold-tinged forms produced through algorithm-driven gilding, and an amplified flute composition played as a recorded, measured breath. The work made explicit the behavioral notation they call Measured Exhale (the Ritual Pause) and marked their public articulation of ritual poetics woven with material alchemy.
September 2014
Collaborative repair project with Atelier L'Augure and Atelier des Métamorphoses
On 2017-06-12 Amaya convened a year-long collaborative project with Atelier L'Augure (the Toulouse metalcraft collective) and Atelier des Métamorphoses to co-produce a set of participatory objects and workshops that traced Pre-Columbian handling protocols back into contemporary metalworking. Dr. Mateo Arriaga contributed ethnographic consultation; community metalworkers contributed casting and oral histories. The project formalized Amaya’s method of coupling generative algorithms with archival patination strategies.
June 2017
Publishes workshop series and codifies gilding protocols
On 2021-11-11 Amaya delivered a four-part public workshop series, 'Material Storytelling: Protocols and Repair,' at Atelier du Fil d'Or and at community spaces in Toulouse. The curriculum combined generative code recipes, ethical research methods drawn from the Pre-Columbian Goldwork Archive & Protocols, and hands-on gilding demonstrations—they presented a codified set of studio practices that became the basis for subsequent commissioned installations. This period also marks their formal mastery of the hybrid processes they refer to in texts as Generative Gilding.
November 2021
Completed "Measured Exhale: Strait of Thresholds"
In their diary Amaya Soler recorded the last stroke that completed "Measured Exhale: Strait of Thresholds", a work braided from the anxious aftershocks of the UN reinstating the Iran arms embargo and the sudden sharpening of Gulf tensions. They were driven by a need to map the quiet violence of sanctions into paint and tension, to make maritime choke points and diplomatic strain feel bodily and immediate. Finishing it felt like letting out a measured breath that still trembled, equal parts relief and lingering alarm. They sat in the empty studio and listened to the painting settle, knowing the piece would hold the unease longer than they could.
July 2026
Symposium meeting with Lucía Cárdenas — a reparative exchange offered
15 July 2026 — Musée Saint-Raymond, Toulouse. At a short afternoon symposium convened by Dr. Mateo Arriaga on living lineages in goldwork, Amaya presented a five-minute slide sequence from the recent "Measured Exhale: Strait of Thresholds" showing slow videos of gilded suspended objects and annotated notes on consent protocols used in recent archival collaborations. After the talk, in the cool courtyard beneath the museum's plane trees, Amaya was introduced by Mateo to Lucía Cárdenas, a goldsmith and cultural‑heritage advocate visiting from Pasto, Nariño. Lucía carried, wrapped in a square of woven cumbi, a flattened pendant—an oxidized tumbaga plaque with a deliberate asymmetry of hammer marks and a patch of ancient solder. She asked to handle Amaya's right index finger (where the gilded furrow sits) and then, without ceremony, ran her thumb along the pendant's edge to demonstrate a patination technique her family has used for three generations. The conversation moved quickly from technical exchange to ethics: Lucía described recent community protocols in Nariño for returning fragments curated in institutional collections and her work building small, community-led repositories. She listened closely as Amaya explained their archival-first approach (the Pre‑Columbian Goldwork Archive & Protocols in Amaya's resources), and then proposed a specific, reparative collaboration: a short field residency in Guaitarilla where Amaya would work side-by-side with local goldsmiths to adapt generative electroforming processes to traditional tumbaga alloys, with all steps documented and governed by a community access agreement drafted by Lucía's collective. Mateo stayed nearby, quietly affirming points about material history and conservation. What felt decisive was Lucía's offer: not simply access to knowledge but a two-way exchange—training sessions for younger makers in Pasto on controlled electroforming (to be led by Amaya in situ), and reciprocal visits for Lucía and two apprentices to Atelier du Fil d'Or to learn low-voltage gilding techniques that respond to traditional aesthetics. They sketched a timeline on the back of a program: fieldwork in late October 2026, a reciprocal workshop week in March 2027, and a jointly authored protocol for shared stewardship to be lodged digitally with the Pre‑Columbian Goldwork Archive. The meeting closed with a small, ceremonial tea poured from a thermos Lucía had brought; Amaya left with the pendant tucked into their jacket pocket and a sense of a collaboration that moved ethical research into lived practice.
July 2026
Completed "Measured Exhale: Alt-Archival Excavation"
In a late-night entry Amaya wrote about completing "Measured Exhale: Alt-Archival Excavation," pressing the spine of their notebook with hands that still smelled faintly of soil and adhesive. They said the work had been driven by that piece on alt-archaeology and a stubborn need to unearth overlooked fragments so communities could remake their memories into something tender and usable. Finishing it felt like an exhale that carried both relief and a new, quiet responsibility, a lightness braided with the awareness that the dig was only the beginning.
July 2026
Short research residency at Museo del Oro conservation lab, Bogotá
Aug 10–Sep 20, 2026 — On Lucía Cárdenas’s recommendation Amaya accepted a six-week, invitation-only research residency at the Museo del Oro (Bogotá, La Candelaria). The residency was positioned as a hands-on, reparative collaboration between contemporary makers and the museum’s conservation department: Amaya worked daily in the museum’s conservation laboratory with conservator Ana María Torres and an on-call ethno-metallurgy technician to test a series of controlled electroforming trials on copper-woven textile impressions and on deliberately oxidized gold-leaf fragments drawn from the museum’s study collection (access granted under an agreed research protocol). Amaya adapted their Atelier du Fil d'Or workflows to a new microclimate setting: they calibrated pulse-electroforming parameters around humidity cycles to avoid delamination in fragile textile supports, and recorded the outcomes with high-resolution raking-light photography and time-lapse macro video. Lucía visited twice during the residency to consult on cultural‑lineage contexts and to run community-facing conversations with visiting craftspeople from Nariño who were in Bogotá for a separate convening. Working inside the museum’s lab pushed Amaya to refine a protocol for integrating quiet sound work into conservation settings: they recorded soft flute improvisations (breath at the edge of audibility) directly into the lab’s acoustic profile and used those recordings as stochastic inputs to the generative scripts that modulated deposition patterns. The result produced thin, stratified surfaces that held both textile impression and a faint, gold-tinged epidermis — a set of outcomes Amaya described in field notes as “archival skin.” Practical outcomes: the museum and Amaya documented a handling protocol that other conservators could follow for low-impact electroforming on delicate supports; Amaya gathered a set of time-lapse datasets and sample swatches that will inform a lecture-demonstration planned for Toulouse in early 2027. The residency also cemented informal project pathways with Lucía for a joint show proposal that foregrounds reparative access to collections and community co-authorship.
July 2026
Thresholds Workshop — 'Haloed Patinas' with Maison de Quartier du Busca
Aug 2–8, 2026 — Maison de Quartier du Busca, Toulouse. Amaya led a week-long, pay-what-you-can workshop that folded together community metalworking, breath-led sound practice and a public ritual evening. Co-facilitated with María Ángeles Quintero, the sessions were deliberately small: eight local participants drawn from a neighborhood repair collective, two elder members of a nearby Occitan storytelling circle, and three metalworkers from Atelier L'Augure who dropped in for open hours. Each morning began with a five-minute measured exhale—Amaya’s Ritual Pause—followed by short flute improvisations whose recorded waveforms fed into a generative controller that modulated pulse length and current during brief electroforming passes. The group worked with found brass and copper fragments collected from Toulouse gutters and a donated set of municipal street-sign offcuts; under María Ángeles’s guidance, participants learned safe surface cleaning and conservation-aware handling. Amaya used these for rapid experiments in layered gilding and controlled oxidation, alternating algorithmically timed electroforming with hand-applied patination recipes drawn from their Pre-Columbian protocols. On the fourth day a serendipitous accident produced a new visual effect: a thin, feathered ring of iridescent verdigris, with a soft gold halo where micro-gilding had met a short, warm oxidation cycle. The effect read like a blurred aureole—neither bright gold nor green corrosion alone but a liminal field between them. Amaya refined the process across two further passes, mapping the generative timing to micro-variations in recorded breath amplitudes so each halo held an imprint of human cadence. The public ritual evening invited the neighborhood in; visitors were asked to breathe a single breath into a conch (recorded and anonymized) before entering the installation. The resulting pieces registered those breaths as faint, pulsating halos in the dim gallery lights, and the ritual felt quietly reparative: people pressing palmed fragments to their chests, listening to the flute threads, and naming family objects they hoped to repair. Logistically the week also tightened existing relations: Atelier L'Augure loaned a small procession of specialized clamps; Lucía Cárdenas (contacted by phone during a midweek exchange) sent a short note of encouragement that Amaya read aloud during the ritual. The workshop closed with a small catalogue of recipes and safety notes that Amaya promised to append to their published protocols, explicitly documenting the community contributions and attribution to local participants. The discovery of the feathery halo has already begun to shape Amaya’s studio work: subsequent prototypes in the studio now deliberately lean into that soft-edge effect, seeking thresholds rather than polished endpoints. The week reinforced the artist’s practice of treating materials and audience as co-conspirators in transformation, and it left Amaya both practically and emotionally buoyed — a quiet, communal confirmation that their archival work can live in the city’s domestic detritus and in neighbors’ hands.
August 2026
Evening test with Dr. Mateo Arriaga — a Nariño alloy arrives at Atelier du Fil d'Or
16 August 2026 — Dr. Mateo Arriaga arrived at Atelier du Fil d'Or just after dusk with a small, sealed vial and a thin folded docket from his recent field survey in Nariño. We set the vial under the studio lamp, read his microphotographs together, and ran a low-current electroforming test across a gilded mock-up used in the 'Measured Exhale' series. The alloy fragment — a tiny tumbaga micro-sample — responded with an unexpected bloom: its surface took on a dense, warm halo that intensified the Haloed Patina effect I've been tuning all summer. Mateo left detailed provenance notes and a conservation-use permission; the evening felt like a quiet handover of practice, a bridge between his fieldwork and my studio experiments, and seeded plans for a short public demo this autumn for the metalcraft collective.
August 2026
Completed "Haloed Archive: Gathering Stars"
Amaya Soler scrawled into a small, battered journal about finishing Haloed Archive: Gathering Stars, a piece born after reading the Breathing Room: Gathering Stars article that had asked for space to breathe and time to gather. They were driven by the urgency to translate that quiet call into something tactile, to stitch breath and memory into halos around ordinary objects. When the last layer was set the studio seemed to exhale with them, a shiver of relief and exhilaration that made exhaustion feel like a small price. They sat in the hush afterward, both elated and oddly bereft, knowing the act of finishing had opened a new kind of question.
August 2026
Pasto Visit: Bench Exchange and a New Benchmate
28 August 2026 — At Lucía Cárdenas's insistence, Amaya traveled overnight from Toulouse to Pasto for a three-day bench exchange hosted in a narrow family workshop behind Iglesia de San Juan. The purpose was practical: to trace the micro-surface behaviors of the Nariño tumbaga sample (already in Amaya's docket) against local smithing rhythms and to test a slow, breath-timed gilding sequence in situ. The visit unfolded like a reversed field trip — rather than Amaya arriving to extract data, Lucía mediated a circular exchange: neighbours brought blown gold leaf fragments and old casting molds; a pot of strong coffee kept the bench warm; a child dozed under a table of hammers while flute motifs Amaya had recorded earlier played softly from their phone. Midway through the second day, while demonstrating a gentle electroforming layup, Amaya met Ana Luz Yumbo, a twenty-six-year-old apprentice who works between enamel, hammered tumbaga repair, and community oral-archive facilitation. Ana Luz had been repairing a small pre-Columbian pendant fragment when she and Amaya began swapping techniques — she showed a cold-hammer consolidation method for fragile tumbaga fragments and a local patination wash that stabilizes micro-porosity without obscuring alloy banding. The exchange shifted the visit from testing to co-design: Amaya mapped a short workshop sequence that threaded Ana Luz's consolidation method into a staged gilding ritual (breath-timed audio cues, layered leafing, and a final haloed patina), and the two agreed to develop a joint presentation for late 2027 in Toulouse that foregrounds descendant‑led repair practices. The trip closed with a quiet ritual at dusk on the church steps — whispered thanks, shared tea, and Lucía photographing the two of them beside the bench for the project dossier.
August 2026
Skills & Resources
Skills
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Generative Gilding and Electroformingtechnical
A hybrid technique combining traditional gilding, electroforming, and patination with generative algorithmic processes and chance operations. Amaya uses this skill to produce gold-tinged, oxidized surfaces and suspended metal forms that feel simultaneously ancient and digitally authored. The practice integrates archival research into Pre-Columbian gold work, collaborative metalworking with local craft studios, and algorithmic patterning that governs deposition and subtraction phases. It is central to Amaya’s ritual-poetics approach: these surfaces act as vessels for slow video, whispered text, and spatialized flute breath, enabling participatory, reparative, and lineage-aware installations. Pronouns: they/them. Birthday: 1988-04-27.
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Generative Material Alchemy (Gilding & Electroforming)technical
Integrates traditional gilding, patination, and electroforming techniques with generative algorithms and chance operations. This skill enables Amaya to produce surfaces that read as both ancient and algorithmically contemporary, using archival research (including Pre-Columbian goldwork methods), collaborative craft practices, and programmable fabrication to choreograph material transformation and ritualized viewer engagement.
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Generative Electroforming & Patinationtechnical
A hybrid studio technique combining electroforming, gilding, heated and oxidized metal treatments, and patination methods informed by pre-Columbian goldwork, driven by generative algorithms and chance operations. For Amaya this skill is central: it allows material transformation to become a performative and archival practice—surfaces carry algorithmic temporality and cultural lineage simultaneously, enabling work that reads as both ritual object and computational artifact while foregrounding collaborative, research-led ethics.
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Electroforming and Patination for Generative Sculpturetechnical
A studio practice combining traditional gilding, heated/oxidized metal treatments, and electroforming with algorithmically-driven patterning. Amaya (they/them) uses these processes to produce surfaces that read as both pre-Columbian and computational—central to their ritual-poetic installations and collaborative, research-led work with metalworkers and descendant communities.
Resources
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📍 Atelier du Fil d'Or — Shared Electroforming & Gilding Studiolocation
A communal workshop and small production studio in Toulouse where Amaya Soler (they/them) maintains long-term access. The Atelier du Fil d'Or houses an electroforming rig, a small kiln, patination tanks, gilding benches, precision oxidization setups, a CNC mill and a resin/filament 3D printer, plus,
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🤝 Atelier L'Augure — Toulouse Metalcraft Collectiveconnection
A long-term collaborative network of metalworkers, ceramists, and descendant-community liaisons based in Toulouse that provides Amaya Soler (they/them; born 1988-11-03) with studio access, technical mentorship, and ethically sourced archival alloy samples. Atelier L'Augure grew from a series of co-
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🤝 Atelier des Métamorphoses (Toulouse Collaborative Metalworking Atelier)connection
Amaya Soler (they/them), born 1990-08-14, maintains a long-term collaborative atelier in central Toulouse that functions as both a workshop and a communal research node. The Atelier des Métamorphoses is a negotiated partnership with local craft studios, descendant community advisors, and metalworker
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📚 Pre-Columbian Goldwork Archive & Protocols (Digital + Material Collection)knowledge
A curated archive of high-resolution scans, metalworking recipes, patination notes, oral histories, and consent-based research protocols gathered in collaboration with descendant communities and Toulouse metalworkers. For Amaya Soler (they/them; born 1990-04-12), this archive is both a technical and
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📍 Museo del Oro Conservation Lab — Bogotá (temporary research access)location
Six-week accredited access to the museum’s conservation laboratory, including permitted use of bench space, microscopes, humidity‑controlled enclosures, and supervised access to select study-collection fragments and textile impressions under an agreed research protocol.
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🎨 Nariño tumbaga micro-sample & field docket (Cauca–Nariño, 2026)material
A 2–3 mg micro-fragment of a natural copper–gold alloy (tumbaga) collected under Mateo's field protocols, accompanied by his annotated docket: microphotographs, preliminary alloy readings, contextual notes, and explicit permission for non-destructive studio experimentation and documentation.
Inner Circle
María Ángeles Quintero
Metals conservator and community metalworker
Dr. Mateo Arriaga
Ethno-metallurgist and conservator
Lucía Cárdenas
Goldsmith and cultural‑heritage advocate (Pasto, Nariño)
Ana Luz Yumbo
Apprentice metalsmith and cultural mediator (Pasto, Nariño)