Alexandra Gelis is a Colombian–Venezuelan media artist, educator, and researcher living between Canada, Panama, and Colombia. Working at the intersection of ecology, migration, science & technology, and multispecies co-resistance, her research-based, process-driven practice is grounded in plant-based research-creation. She works across film, photography, drawing, sound, performance, and media installation with custom-built interactive electronics.
Her projects incorporate personal field research as a way of investigating the ecologies of specific landscapes by tracing the marks left by socio-political interventions. From this plant-based research-creation, she explores, documents, and re-creates ecologies that take shape between plants and people, and between plants and their multispecies interrelationships. Through these installations and images, she creates living archives of co-resistance and care.
Phytosphere & Migrated Plants
Gelis’s practice is rooted in an interest in the phytosphere as a living atmosphere in which roots, breaths, and flows interpenetrate. Through her projects, she explores the poetics of human–flora interdependencies and multispecies correspondences that make the vegetal world a common climate of existence, understanding human life as just one inflection of a more-than-human grammar.
The idea of plants as political allies and as actors is central to her concept of “Migrated Plants”—a term she uses to frame migrant plants as agents of memory and resistance in contexts shaped by colonialism, displacement, war, and migratory and racial regimes.
Practice
Gelis’s projects emerge from long-term fieldwork, listening walks, and collaborative workshops, often developed with communities in territories marked by conflict, displacement, or environmental transformation. She works with plant fibres, handmade paper, sound recording, and custom-built interactive electronics to create installations, performances, and films that invite audiences into multisensory encounters with plants, rivers, and contested landscapes.
Exhibitions & Screenings
Gelis has exhibited in film festivals, museums, and exhibitions internationally across the Americas, Europe, and Africa. Her work has been presented at institutions and events such as the Walker Art Center; Oberhausen International Short Film Festival; Internationale Kurzfilmtage Winterthur; Bienal del Sur; Images Festival (Toronto); ArtworxTO (Toronto); OBORO (Montreal); Museum of London (Canada); YYZ Artists’ Outlet; Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Montevideo; Centro Cultural Recoleta (Buenos Aires); LABOCINE; Kuala Lumpur Experimental Film; Alucine Latin Media Festival; Vancouver Latin American Film Festival; Dresdner Schmalfilmtage; Pleasure Dome; Museo La Tertulia; Espacios Revelados / Changing Places; The Paseo Project (New Mexico); among others.
Her innovative installations, exhibited widely, are featured in the book Alexandra Gelis: Seed, edited by Mike Hoolboom and Clint Enns.
Talks & Teaching
She has given talks and participated in public programs at the Kassel and documenta Institute (Germany), Laboratorio Arte Alameda (Mexico City), the University of Zurich, and at numerous arts and food sovereignty conferences. Alongside her artistic practice, she teaches, writes, and lectures on research-creation, plants, and political ecologies.
Awards & Fellowships
Alexandra has been the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including support from the Canada Council for the Arts, Ontario Arts Council, Toronto Arts Council, the Paavo & Aino Lukkari Award, Musagetes Arts Foundation, and rare Charitable Research Reserve. She also holds a Colciencias Doctoral Fellowship for her Ph.D. research Migrant Plants: Arts-Based Inquiry into Plant/Human Relations.