Through sculptural and participatory works, Andrea Ferrero reimagines symbols of power embedded in architecture, ritual, and collective memory, using fiction, archival research, and ephemeral materials to invite critical reflection and reappropriation.
Andrea Ferrero (b. Lima, Peru, 1991) is a visual artist living and working in Mexico City. Her practice engages with themes of power, iconography, and collective consciousness, examining how symbols of domination are constructed, staged, and embedded within architecture, ritual, and public space. She was a participant in the Malta Biennale 2024 and has exhibited internationally at institutions and galleries including Museo Jumex and Museo Tamayo (Mexico City), Taoyuan Museum of Fine Arts – TMOFA (Taoyuan), Swivell Gallery (New York), Gallery Shilla (Seoul), and Museo de Arte Contemporáneo (Lima). In 2025, her work continues to be presented through solo and group exhibitions in Europe and Latin America.
Ferrero completed the SOMA Academic Program in Mexico City (2019–2021) and has taken part in international artist residencies at MASS MoCA (Massachusetts), Pivô arte e pesquisa (São Paulo), HANGAR – Centro de Investigação Artística (Lisbon), and FLORA ars+natura (Bogotá). Her work has been recognized through awards and distinctions, including the Virginia A. Groot Foundation Award and finalist status in the Taoyuan International Art Award.
Ferrero’s work critically reflects on iconographies of power and our relationship to them by staging fictional realities that playfully encourage new ways of reappropriating and resignifying symbols of domination embedded in the built environment and collective memory. In recent years, her research has focused on food as spectacle and on eating rituals as stagings of power, exploring their relationship to architecture, ceremonial aesthetics, and colonial legacies through strategies of humor and fiction.
Drawing from archival research and employing techniques such as photogrammetry, molds, imprints, and 3D printing, her recent projects often unfold as edible sculptures and installations. These works emphasize processes of eating, digesting, metabolizing, and excreting, frequently involving the audience in participatory and ephemeral experiences. By recreating architectural fragments and ornamental motifs in materials such as chocolate, sugar, gelatin, and cake, Ferrero strips symbols of power of their permanence, transforming them into temporary forms destined to decay.
Her recent body of work takes as a point of departure the operatic spectacles staged around food in European courts, where banquets functioned as displays of political control, wealth, and access to resources extracted from colonized territories. Sugar central to the emergence of the global market and tied to land monopolization and the enslavement of Indigenous peoples becomes a key material and metaphor within her practice. Through edible monuments and ornamental structures, Ferrero exposes how excess, decoration, and architectural grandeur have historically operated as tools of domination, proposing instead collective acts of consumption and destruction as a means to critically metabolize entrenched colonial histories.