Paula Vidal

Statement

Paula Vidal, an academic trained architect, is an artist who works with space as a canvas. Her large-format installations are on-site interventions that seek to launch questions that visitors must answer through their bodies, thus questioning their perception of physical and mental territories.

She works with pneumatic structures they allow her to generate changing spaces, which are always different and sensitive to the presence of the spectator. Spaces that are more democratic because they involver multiple sources of authorship. Throught the visitor activation, the artpiece will generate a new reality that is not only spatial, but also emotional, because architecture has that power: the power to modify people’s mood and state of mind.

Vidal’s work seeks to question established realities, always through play and individual experience. The concept Homo-Ludens is part of her seminal thinking, whose purpose is to stimulate and alter emotions. Play and knowledge, like play and reality, dialogue as conceptual opposites, united by the same crisis and necessity.

GlogauAIR Project

At GlogauAIR Paula Vidal will present her new project Out of Season Shelters (OSS), an art installation that investigates and questions the terms “beauty”, applied to priscine nature, and “ugliness”, to humanized nature, in order to critize values implicit in the concept of ecology.

OSS reinterprets the agrarian architecture of the greenhouses of Almería, Spain. Criticized by national/international media, this sea of plastic extends over 360 km2, area slightly larger than Munich and is the world’s largest concentration intensive agriculture. The fruits and vegetables grow in closed spaces that make visible the true ugliness: the careless consumption of out of season products from northern European countries, especially Germany.

OSS, ironically, transforms the image of greenhouses into an idealized scenography. Seeing beautiful what seemed horrible allows us to ask ourselves: What is more important aesthetics or ecology? What is ugly? The greenhouses? The symbol of consumption without limits, this endless sea of plastic? The anti-ecological burden of plastic? Or are they serviced because of the humans, impact on the landscape and the anthropocene.

By removing the burden of ugliness from plastic architecture, the aim is not to affirm or defend it, but to disarm the critique of aesthetics so that the real questions that allow for social change can emerge.

Architecture and Installation.

CV Summary

Education

• Architecture. San Pablo CEU University. End of studies July 2017. Final degree Project Outstanding.
• Exchange student. Universidad de la República, Uruguay 2014-2015.
• Art History. Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. 2005-2009.

Exhibitions and Awards

• 2021 Monopol, Berlin, Germany. Collective Exhibition, Chilean Conexion IV
• 2020 Kastanien Projektraum, Berlin, DE. Solo Exhibition
• 2020 Kastanien Projektraum Berlin, Germany. Collective Exhibition, Chilean Conexion III
• 2019 GlogauAIR, Berlin, Germany. Collective Exhibition, Chilean Conexion II
• 2018 Venice Biennale. Collective Exhibition, Becoming Edition
• 2017 Küzefest Festival_ Video Mapping. Museo de Arte Contemporáneo. Chile
• 2016 S.Pablo CEU University. Winner Shortcut Category, Creative Contest. “Gene Transfer”
• 2015 F. Banco Santander. Second Price. Contest Videotalentos. “Gene Transfer”
• 2014 Yofi Fest Film Festival. Display. NY. “Paco Peralta, Back to Start”
• 2014 S.Pablo CEU University. Winner Shortcut Category, Creative Contest. “Materia Mater”
• 2013 Europan 12. Honorable Mention. Assen, The Netherlands.
• 2013 S.Pablo CEU University. Winner Shortcut Category, Creative Contest. “Obsession”
• 2013 F. Banco Santander. Finalist. Videotalentos. “Yves Klein. Obsesión”
• 2012 COAM. Exhibition “Plazas de Toros Desmontables” and Plaza las Ventas. Curators Picado y de Blas Studio

Publications

• YA NO NOS IMPORTA_ 2018 Exhibition Catalogue
• ATLAS. AQUELLOS QUE ESPERAN_2018 Exhibition Catalogue
• PLAZAS DESMONTABLES_2012 Exhibition Catalogue

Gallery