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Canada
Sandra-Viviana Murillo-Morales (arQ RunicoS) is a Colombian-born interdisciplinary artist based in Tiohtiá:ke / Mooniyang / Montreal, Canada. Her work weaves together synaesthetic art, ambidextrous drawing, and paper sculpture, grounded in over 20 years of experience in environmental and urban design. With academic training in Architecture, Urban Planning, and a Master’s in Environment and Sustainability, she creates contemplative abstract works that explore the connections between nature, colour, music, and emotion—fostering well-being and supporting socio-ecological transition.
Her art expression serves as a metaphor for her body’s rebirth overcoming an unexpected critical illness. In 2020, Sandra-Viviana shifted her career fully toward the arts, advancing her drawing technique with coloured pencils and mixed media. Informed by her colour synaesthesia, this process became the foundation of her paper art practice and her series Topo.graphies of Emotions: crumpled, coloured tracing paper infused with recycled pigments from pencil shavings, modeled ambidextrously to translate the inner landscapes of her emotions and synaesthetic perceptions into three-dimensional form.
At Paper Camp – Paper Art Residence in Loulé, Viviana explores the sculptural potential of paper by weaving her ambidextrous drawing practice into a dialogue with place, colour, and light.
Through her participation in Paper Camp, she reflects on temporary migration journeys—mirroring her own brief stay in Loulé—and deepens her long-standing love of paper, a material that bridges her architectural background with her reverence for trees as vessels of living memory. Her work engages directly with the residency’s theme, Self Topography on Paper, as she translates inner journeys and lived experiences—migration in search of “the nest,” the secure space for self-reproduction we all seek while navigating our perception of reality.
Her creations explore memory landscapes shaped from and with paper. This residency supports the development of her current projects: La couleur sans mots, une sculpture en pleine lumière (Wordless Colour, a Sculpture in Full Light), supported by the Conseil des Arts de Montréal, and El viaje del colibrí, una metáfora de la migración (The Hummingbird’s Journey, a Migratory Metaphor), financed by the Consulate of Colombia in Montréal’s « Casas Colombia » program. Inspired by the symbolic migration of the only hummingbird that travels from South America to Quebec, these projects reflect the emotional migration stories we carry within us.
