Isadora Romero
In her distinguished project, Ecuadorian photographer Isadora Romero creates a multilayered visual narrative about two cloud forests in her homeland: the Chocó Andino de Pichincha biosphere of the Yunguilla community near the capital city of Quito and the Mache-Chindul reserve near the Pacific Ocean.
Her work opens up a sensitive and poetic view on forms of cohabitation with the forest in the past, present, and future. Her photographs were taken in over more than one year, working closely in tandem with local communities, scientists, and research organizations, focusing on community reforesting initiatives, agroecological practices, and sustainable forms of management.
Romero’s artistic practice moves between documentary photography and experimental processes. In the exhibition, her material-based experiments with plants and textiles are shown together with photos taken from local family archives that have changed due to humidity in the forest. Moreover, her use of infrared and UV technologies offer a speculative perspective on how forest fauna perceive the world.
A central motif in her thinking is cross-generational knowledge transfer. For Romero, this term also includes the traditional wisdom of indigenous cultures such as Yumbo and Jama Coaque. She traces the remnants of pre-Colombian trade routes known as culuncos, and photographs artifacts in local museums that she stages using brightly colored fabrics.
Notes on How to Build a Forest is a decolonial reflection on our relationship to the world. In it, Romero is able to tell a nuanced story of the forest as a living organism without reducing it to deforestation, a CO2 storehouse, or a romanticized Western idea of “untouched nature”. The work examines the forest’s possible futures as a shared habitat, a place of collective memory, cultural negotiations—and not least as a mirror for global responsibility in the Anthropocene era.
The double exhibition is curated by Katharina Täschner, Curator at C/O Berlin. A corresponding publication will be released by Hartmann Books for each exhibition. After their first stop at C/O Berlin, the exhibitions will be on view in spring 2026 at the Open Space of the Crespo Foundation in Frankfurt am Main.
Isadora Romero (b. 1987, Ecuador) is a visual storyteller working at the intersection of documentary and fine-art photography. Her work is characterized by a strong involvement in social and ecological justice, with a special focus on agricultural diversity, food sovereignty, and historical and symbolic connections between people and land. She documents and reflects on the connection between communities and their environments, using this to develop new perspectives that are always founded on a slow, collaborative, and context-based approach. She co-founded Ruda, a Latin-American female photographs’ collective. Her work has been exhibited in Ecuador and abroad. She has completed residencies in Antarctica (INAE), Mexico (CASA), and Luxemburg (Neimenster). Her awards include Discovery Award at Rencontres d’Arles (2023), the global and regional Open Format Award from World Press Photo (2022), the POY Latam multimedia prize (2023), as well as the Marilyn Stafford Award (2021). She has also received support from Magnum Foundation, Prince Claus Fund, and National Geographic. She is the author of Moving, to See You and co-author of Siete Punto Ocho.
