Description
Caliban RAMIREZ — An artistic signature between myth, memory, and contemporary alchemy
Chilean-born visual artist based in Belgium, Caliban Ramirez has been developing for over thirty years a powerful and multifaceted body of work exploring memory, myth, and inner transformation.
Trained in monumental painting at RHOK (Brussels), he combines social engagement, visual poetry, and identity research within a profoundly contemporary practice.
Working across painting, drawing, installation, and performance, Ramirez demonstrates a deep sensitivity to textures, recycled materials, and handcrafted processes. His work oscillates between expressive figuration and symbolic abstraction, drawing on the indigenous cosmologies of southern Chile — where hybrid and animal figures evoke spiritual syncretism, cultural resistance, and colonial memory.
Each exhibition is conceived as an alchemical transformation, inviting both artist and audience to take part in a shared metamorphosis.
Through residencies and collective projects — at the Maison de la Création or in his Usquare (Ixelles) studio — Ramirez fosters intercultural dialogue and co-creation, blending contemporary art with social engagement.
As an engaged artist and educator, he sees creation as an act of healing and reconstruction, both personal and political. His world invites us to rethink our connection to the earth, to forgotten stories, and to the possibility of rebirth in a world to be re-enchanted.
Biography
Caliban Ramirez (b. 1967, Santiago, Chile) studied monumental painting at the RHOK Institute of Fine Arts in Brussels under Maio Wassemberg, and later at the Academy of Watermael-Boitsfort with Roger Somville and Paul Gobert.
Following in the footsteps of muralist Kata Jorge Nuñez, he has built an artistic practice that crosses disciplines and borders, creating urban art networks and collective projects.
He has taken part in major international events such as Fouart (Montreal), La Giraffe Gallery (Berlin), Zinneke Parade (Brussels, 2000), and Espace Beaujon (Paris).
Founder of the Projection Caliban collective and later of Team In Time (2006, with Julie Duquesne), he also collaborates with choreographers exploring the performative and living arts.
In 2015, he founded espace.remundo in Woluwe-Saint-Lambert, a space for experimentation and artistic freedom.
In 2018, with Benjamin Alvarez, he joined the No Curators’ collective and exhibited in several Artists’ Trails in Saint-Gilles, Tervuren, and La Hulpe.
In 2020, he created Xenia Lab Collective in Tervuren — both living space and gallery — with Jacques DuJardin, Mufuki Mukunda, Teska0, and Jean Delcourt.
Since 2022, Ramirez has defined himself as a multidisciplinary visual artist, rooted in symbolic syncretism, myth, urban art, and decolonial memory. His linocuts summon the creatures of southern Chile in a quest for a critical re-enchantment of the contemporary imagination.
Works
