Natalia Montoya lives and works between her hometown of Iquique, where she was born, and Santiago de Chile. She is a pilgrim of La Tirana, by family tradition. Her work develops from material concerns, questioning her affective knots to the territories of Iquique and La Tirana, in the Tarapacá region. From there, she extracts materials linked to her imaginary, such as fabrics, sequins and light construction materials.

For her first exhibition outside of Chile, Montoya presents Ajayu, a word that means soul or spirit in the Aymara language, spoken by Aymara communities across the Bolivian, Peruvian and Chilean Andes. Ajayu is the outcome of a short residency in Vienna through a collaboration with the local bakery strock. The celebratory and spiritual forms that montoya made in bread together with the Andean funerary breadmaking technique of the T´anta Wawa (small decorated, human-like bread sculptures) with ancient practices and the imaginary of the alpine regions. Amidst these figures, she will also write the Aymara sentence Waranka Waranka Kujtasiñani (We will return in millions), which is used up to  the present day in Andean struggles.

https://www.biennale.wien/en/exhibitions/songs-for-the-changing-seasons