María Primo’s artistic practice draws on her background in anthropology and her fieldwork experience in the Ecuadorian Amazon, where she began to explore in depth the complex relationships between culture, territory, and nature. Since then, her work has investigated the multiple forms of interdependence that shape life, viewing human beings as just one more species within a vast network of ecological connections. Through sustained research processes, she challenges the modern dichotomy between nature and culture and proposes alternative ways of perceiving and inhabiting the world, establishing a dialogue between scientific knowledge, local wisdom, and aesthetic experience to conceive of the landscape as a living space of relationships, memory, and transformation.

Her work is primarily centered on photography, video, photobooks, and cyanotype—media she uses as tools for research and material experimentation. She combines documentary images with archives, interventions, and historical photographic processes to construct visual narratives that push the boundaries of representation. Taking the language of photography as her starting point, María constantly subjects her own practice to scrutiny, in a multidisciplinary and open-ended process of exploration that can lead to the fusion of the image with textiles or even ceramics. The materiality of her works and her use of photosensitive techniques and artisanal processes—closely linked to natural cycles—reinforce a line of inquiry in which the image not only documents but also participates in the ecological processes she explores.

María Primo works as a photographer and visual artist based in Madrid. She studied Art Photography at the Centro de la Imagen (Quito), analog photography at EFTI (Madrid), and earned an MA in Anthropology, Environment, and Cultural Studies from the University of London. Among her most notable projects is A River Is Not a River (Casa Árabe, Madrid and Córdoba, 2023–2024, and Sinnari Houseen EL Cairo), curated by Blanca de la Torre. She has completed residencies in Luxor (Egypt, 2021) and at Villa Bergerie (2025), with support from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation. Her photobook was recognized at PHOTOESPAÑA 2021, and her work is included in collections such as the National Museum of Anthropology, the ENAIRE Foundation, the New York Public Library, and the Regional Archive of the Community of Madrid.