“Archaeology of Birth”
École Cantonale d'Art de Lausanne - ECAL (Switzerland) Master
Julieta Tarraubella
Image from “Archaeology of Birth” project by Julieta Tarraubella
Biography
Website: https://julietatarraubella.com/
Instagram: @julieta.tarraubella
Visual artist and image/sound designer, graduated from the University of Buenos Aires. She is currently pursuing a Master’s in Photography at ÉCAL, Switzerland. Her work has been exhibited at Bienal Sur, MAMBA, Noorderlicht Biennale, MAMM, Art Basel Miami and Paris Photo. She has received awards from Bienal de Arte Joven, GETXOPhoto Festival, and FNA Argentina. In 2026, her photobook Archaeology of Birth was shortlisted for Athens Photo Festival, EXPOSED Torino and iStar awards.
The project
I was born in 1991 in Tacna, southern Perú, in the Atacama Desert. Twenty kilometres away lies Miculla, a valley of petroglyphs from the 5th to the 15th centuries. A week after my birth, my mother baptised me there and offered my life to the universe. Archaeology of Birth takes my mother’s photographic archive of Miculla as its starting point. These images were used to train an AI that reimagines what travellers saw in the desert and carved into stone. Using different representations mediated by technology, the project takes the form of an installation composed of an audiovisual fiction, vibrating petroglyph-rock sculptures, and an embracing panoramic image of the Andes. Giving agency to the elements of the desert, it reconstructs a landscape at once historical, inherited, and imagined.
Image from “Archaeology of Birth” project by Julieta Tarraubella
Image from “Archaeology of Birth” project by Julieta Tarraubella