Guantech is a Colombian-British studio at the threshold of genome and machine — where a 12,000-year amerindian inheritance converses with the lattices of contemporary computation.
Guantech is the studio name of a Colombian-British artist working at the intersection of biological inheritance and computational form. The practice begins from a single fact and a single question.
The fact is genomic: seventy per cent of the artist's ancestry maps to amerindian populations of the northern Andes — a fragment of the Muisca-Guane corridor between the Magdalena and the Cordillera Oriental. The question is what to do with that knowledge in a century that has finally given us the instruments to read it.
For two decades the artist has built a career inside life-science technology and artificial intelligence — protein design, drug discovery, the engineering of molecules that have never existed. Guantech is what happens when that quantitative training turns back on itself.
A pre-Columbian goldsmith's lost-wax technique is recovered and applied to objects designed by gradient descent.
The work is plastic in the older European sense of the word — concerned with form, surface, material, the hand. But the hand is now extended by the lattice. The studio operates as a small laboratory: a kiln beside a GPU cluster, a balance beside an electron microscope, ancestral DNA results beside training logs.
Guantech is neither nostalgia nor techno-utopianism. It refuses both. The proposition is harder and more interesting: that a person carrying twelve millennia of amerindian information in his cells, working in the most accelerative branch of contemporary science, is in a position to make objects that no one else can make. The works are evidence of that position.
A single proposition rendered in two materials — a hammered ancestral alloy meeting a wafer designed by gradient descent. The inaugural work of the studio.
The studio's material vocabulary is drawn directly from this ratio. Tumbaga — the gold-copper alloy used across the pre-Columbian goldsmithing cultures of present-day Colombia — combined with materials of contemporary computation: etched silicon, sintered metal, printed circuit substrate. The proportion is never accidental.
Representation, secondary-market acquisitions, museum loans, and confidential placements. The studio is happy to share full provenance, condition reports, and catalogue entries on request.
trade@guantech.studio Private CollectorsStudio visits in North London and Bogotá by appointment. Commission enquiries welcomed; the studio accepts a limited number of bespoke works per year, beginning with a private conversation about intent.
studio@guantech.studio