Edgar Fabián Frías describes their practice as ‘art spells’: summoning futures grounded in justice, care, and magic through installation, video, performance, ceremony, digital media, and public art. Central to this work is Nierika, a sacred Wixárika technology for world-making and visionary perception, which Frías mobilizes as both methodology and cosmology. Born in East Los Angeles and rooted in their Wixárika and Latinx lineages, they refuse the colonial separations between the ancestral and the emergent, the digital and the ceremonial, the clinical and the sacred. Internationally recognized as a witch and spiritual practitioner, their work is featured in Amy Hale’s forthcoming Beyond the Supernatural: Magic in Contemporary Art (Tate Publishing, 2026).
Working at the intersection of Indigenous Futurism, queer and trans cosmologies, glitch aesthetics, animism, and somatic healing, Frías creates immersive works that function simultaneously as spells, maps, and mirrors. Their practice is also grounded in their work as a licensed psychotherapist; felt knowledge, collective body, and community transformation are not peripheral concerns but structural principles.
Edgar Fabián Frías’ residency is part of the Human-Machine program at the Young Academy Berlin, in cooperation with E-Werk Luckenwalde and the E.ON Foundation. The fellowship supports artistic explorations of digital technologies and artificial intelligence—particularly from perspectives that critically question Western narratives of progress and binary systems of classification such as “natural” and “artificial,” and that enable new ways of thinking, narratives, and approaches to the world.