This work captures the current state of the artist’s practice more than a finished product. Formulated as an intimate space, it is an invitation to enter, if only for a moment, to the artist's internal tensions and struggles, what she refers to as the Spanish word “malestares”. “Malestar”, a combination of “mal” (bad, ill) and “estar” (to be), describe the state of uneasiness that both the body and the mind suffer when exposed to threats or incoherences (like viruses or injustices). From her anxious body, she redefines her malestares from painful sensations that are treated individually to symptoms that reveal a bigger social reality: that of a moribund system. Through this research, not without blocks and fears, she is ultimately tracing a connection between her own body and her social body in an attempt to find ways of rooting that bring up more inclusive values.

The objects of clay are conceived to be touched, grabbed, felt. They talk about the artist's bodily experiences and needs. The artist is not a potter, but she found in clay a way to think out of her body, with her hands, in a more primal, grounding and earthly way.

Picture by Giorgia Lo Faso.

Picture by Giorgia Lo Faso.

Picture by Ron Bokje.

Picture by Lin Chun Yao

Picture by Lin Chun Yao.

Artist statement

I am an artistic designer, a researcher and an educator. My practice and thought, indistinguishible from one another, are transdisciplinar —always in an urge to weave deeper meanings and find unlikely connections.
As a practicioner, I work with text, objects and spaces, always aiming for a sort of interaction. As a researcher and educator, I am interested in the intersection between design and contemporary art as a rich way to address pressing social and cultural issues. Ultimately, my aim is to create —conceptually and/or physically— spaces of encounter, places to experience and be together (what I call in Spanish, "convivencia").

Ambitions

In the next five years I hope to consolidate my practice and its different dimensions. At some point in the future, I would love to orientate my research towards a possible PHD, since education and research are fundamental in my work, but at the moment, I'm especially focused in building a healthier relationship with my time, my energy, my life and my work.

Learned during the studies

In the years I spent at the MAFA I leart to observe, to question, to articulate my thoughts, to think twice. I built a strong sense of awareness, towards myself and to the others. But especially and mostly, I left with a deeper understanding of what I don't know and a porous and open attitude towards surprising different ways of thinking, making and sharing.

List of publications / exhibitions / prices / concerts / shows etc.

[Exhibition] Refractions | Grad. show at Basis voor de Actuele Kunsten (BAK), Utrecht [NL] | VVAA
[Research paper] A.I.R.: From radical individuality to connected subjectivity | Temes de Disseny · Elisava research magazine | Barcelona [ES] | Co-authors: Elisa Cuesta, Pedro Arnanz and Victoria de la Torre
[Project article] Imagined Cre(AI)tures | “Freeport. Anatomías de una caja negra“ | Madrid [ES] | VVAA
[Exhibition] “In These Strange Times” | Science Gallery Dublin [IR] | Elisa Cuesta, Pedro Arnanz and Victoria de la Torre
[Residency] Artist in Retreat | Curated by Xenia Klein | Blekinge [SE] | VVAA
[Residency] Artist in Residency Program by Science Gallery Dublin & Accenture’s innovation centre The Dock | Dublin [IR] & Madrid [ES] | Elisa Cuesta, Pedro Arnanz and Victoria de la Torre

Anxious Bodies in the Anxious Culture. Anxiety, roots and the struggle to practice.

In this essay, I reflect on anxiety,
rootedness and uprootedness,
myself and my culture.
I depart from my physical body to
meet my social body,
that is the poetic way I decided to think about
the society I’m part of,
as daughter of the West.
All of this has constituted
the main challenge here:
to articulate a collection of thoughts, references,
emotions, intuitions and practices that
have been synapsing in my mind for a while
but that I have only now managed to set
in a more or less coherent narrative.
But isn’t that what artistic research is about, after all?

A.I.R. From radical individuality to collective subjectivity.

A.I.R. is a spatial installation, an inflatable sculpture, a graphic piece, an online archive, a poem and a research paper. In the midst of the confinement due to COVID-19, Pedro Arnanz, Elisa Cuesta and I wondered what was happening to our agency as individuals and as collectives in such an excepcionally enclosed moment in which the only way to remain close was through the digital realm. We carried out an exercise of listening to the social media during the first six months of 2020 to see which conversations were keeping us close, and embodied them in a breathing sculpture. Ultimately, we wanted to ask: how close do you feel?
A.I.R. is the outcome of the Art in Residency Program —hosted by the Science Gallery Dublin [IR] and Accenture’s Innovation Center The Dock [IR]— that turned out to be a residency in remoteness due to the pandemic.