ALVARO GABRIEL MARTINEZ

Character Design

In 2014, I had the privilege of studying and graduating as a Character Designer from Pictoplasma Academy. This unique and enriching experience has profoundly shaped my artistic journey. Since then, I have been creating character designs both in my free time and professionally. Here are some examples of my work from the past few years.

Abschnitt drei

Here’s an example of work I did for a very kind client: logo design, tri-fold brochure design, and website design. You can view the website at: https://www.abschnittdrei.de

Thinkflowgraphics

In the last few months I have had the opportunity to collaborate with the artist and biologist Joanna Mitchell (www.textularia.com) on a new project called “Thinkflowgraphics”. Our goal, to select scientific papers and transform them into infographics that make scientific knowledge more accessible to the general public.

Ageing in a Time of Mobility

Client: Max Planck Institut for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity Website: www.ageingandmobility.com Curation, digitalization and visualization of four anthropological researches. For the visualization of four anthropological researches I set up a website with an interactive homepage and internal pages that scroll vertically and horizontally. I also set up 12 infographics with illustrations, and […]

Shelves Gigs

Client: Tempelhof Stadtbibliothek Schöneberg YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLTW2ztPRTUNFXGsIa0k394TmwMnkEmLPK Creative director of the concerts in the Libraries in Berlin Tempelhof/Schöneberg. Camera: Luiza Folegatti and Maria Bethania Medina Sound: Santiago Carrión-Arcos I designed the logo below for this project.

EncounterBegegnung magazine – Third edition

Design, layout, color selection, retouching of images, image curation, illustrations The EncounterBegegnung magazine is a project aimed at the encounter between German communities and newcomers from Arabic- and Persian-speaking countries.It is designed in all four languages, being possible to read German and English from left to right and Arabic and Persian from right to left, […]

EncounterBegegnung magazine – Second edition

The EncounterBegegnung magazine is a project aimed at the encounter between German communities and newcomers from Arabic- and Persian-speaking countries.It is designed in all four languages, being possible to read German and English from left to right and Arabic and Persian from right to left, enabling the encounter of the languages in the middle of […]

Symbol in rituality in the healing process of soul diseases in La Paz, Bolivia

In my thesis I researched a healing technique through rituality and use of symbols developed by the inhabitants in the surroundings of La Paz-Bolivia. Ritual and medical specialists in this region have an understanding of the human being in a holistic and complementary manner. The human, the non-visible beings (spirits) and their ecosystem are perceived as one entity where the balance has to be preserved through reciprocal relations. The violations of normative including this reciprocal norm will conduct very often to a state of sickness or weakness.

Medical and Ritual Specialists are the people in charge of maintaining the balance between the different spheres of the universe. They read the coca leaves, the cards, or the drawings made by their patients to discover the causes of the unbalance. When this is discovered, then a healing technique has to be applied. This techniques are varied but among all of them the koa is the one in which this research is focused on. The koa consists in an offering of a mesa (a preparation of a dish full of symbols and, among others, a death llama fetus) to the spirits at a sacred place.

From the deep case study of one of these specialists, Don Gonzalo Ávila, and the analysis and study of many other specialists and related practices, this research examines the use of symbols as a technique of healing through the koa, the reading of coca, cards and drawings, and the use of talismans and miniatures.