A tour through the studios of the artists selected for the edition of Thinking the City 2024. Part 2

In this article we delve into the creative journey proposed by the remaining six participants in this program, who make up a total of thirteen and who also share their visions and responses created as a result of their inclusion in this collective.

Last September, the Thinking the City call, within the ART U READY program promoted by The Sibarist, invited emerging artists to reflect on the contemporary city. The proposals submitted created an enriching dialogue on the subject, sharing personal experiences, research and critical visions. The result of this first call, organized by The Sibarist with the support of a jury composed of urban planner asun rodríguez montejano, gallery owners Elba Benítez and Javier Aparicio, artist Carlos Garaicoa, cultural manager Paco de Blas, editor Carlos Álvarez and Silvia Hengstenberg of The Sibarist & ART U READY, succeeded in giving visibility to these unique creative visions. This group of artists offered a new interpretation of urban landscapes and societies, and this article, divided in two installments, which is the second part, focuses on the proposals of the remaining 6 among the 14 selected artists. It also explores the repercussions of their participation in this initiative, which seeks to promote emerging art and support the dissemination of the work of artists who thus come to light.

Stefanie Herr

Stefanie Herr (1974) is an architect and visual artist of German origin, who has lived in Barcelona since 2002. Her work combines sculpture and photography, resulting in multidimensional pieces that investigate fragmentation and superposition, with the aim of transforming and questioning meanings.

The author uses paper and cardboard to create pieces that explore topographical data and statistics, merging sculpture and photography. Since 2007, she has dedicated herself entirely to art, moving away from photography to explore a minimalist aesthetic. He has participated in more than 30 international exhibitions.

His work Vistalegre criticizes the real estate market in Barcelona, showing 24 photos of properties from Idealista that evidence the housing crisis. The images transformed into folded curtains conceal the original content, symbolizing the malaise and lack of hope in urban homes. The piece highlights the gap between high housing prices and low wages for citizens.

What is your biggest concern about the contemporary city from your own perspective as an artist?

There are things that really outrage me, but not so much from my perspective as an artist but as an ordinary citizen. What I can’t stand the least is that a society that presumes to be advanced allows people to be forced to live on the street. Homelessness’ is the most serious expression of residential exclusion and shows the crudest face of real estate pressure in cities, which in the medium or long term impoverishes the urban experience and threatens the welfare state. How can we allow absolutely everything to be commodified for the benefit of a few?

What has it meant in your career to participate in this ART U READY initiative?

It was the first time that one of my works was exhibited in Madrid. As I’m not lucky enough to make a living from art, participating -and being selected- in calls for entries is the main way for my personal and professional growth. It’s encouraging that there are initiatives like ART U READY that still consider you an emerging artist at 50, when many other doors have been gradually closing.

What do you see as the idyllic urban landscape of the near future?

I don’t know if the idyllic really has a place in the urban context. I would settle for more equitable and sustainable urban landscapes. I love the superblocks and green axes of Barcelona, which put an end to the dictatorship of the car, invite to walk, stay or play and open patches of wild nature in the middle of the city.

What are you working on now and how has participating in the Pensar la Ciudad initiative influenced you?

I have just delivered a major project for an invitational art competition organized by the state of Berlin, which has taken me a month of intense work. Until the winner is known, no further details can be given. Being an art-in-construction competition (Kunst am Bau), it shares with the Thinking the City initiative its involvement with architecture. Otherwise, it is totally different.

Paula Botella

Paula Botella (1994) is a civil engineer specialized in urban planning and territorial development, trained at the Polytechnic University of Madrid and the Bartlett School of London. She has worked in international cooperation with organizations such as UN Habitat and the European Commission.

Paula Botella is currently pursuing a PhD at the Faculty of Architecture in Madrid, researching landscape design influenced by everyday femininity. She combines her technical training with studies in Fine Arts to explore the poetics of spaces and give visibility to historically marginalized landscape approaches. Her work, in collaboration with the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid and the Conservatorio Profesional de Danza Carmen Amaya, seeks to counteract the urban apathy generated by modernity through new urban imaginaries that encourage interaction with the environment. The resulting video reflects the transition from rapid mobility to conscious immobility, fusing dance and engineering to reimagine the city as a space more connected to its ecosystems.

What is your greatest concern about the contemporary city from your own perspective as an artist?

To understand that the city can only be as part of an ecosystem, otherwise it is harmful. Reconnecting with life cycles, its calm, seasonal, feminine rhythm within the unbridled cybernetic environment to which modern urban design tends is very difficult, but very necessary, an effort of great creativity.

What has it meant in your career to participate in this ART U READY initiative?

This is a difficult question, I’m still not very clear. What I can say is that it was my first exhibition and that the warm and generous atmosphere at the opening encourages me to continue participating in this type of initiative – I really enjoyed it.

What do you see as the idyllic urban landscape of the near future?

A living, organic landscape, which is not afraid of the temporality of life cycles, which is made and unmade to the rhythm of everyday life. These last few months I have been living in Morocco and we have a lot to learn from its more traditional urbanism and its link with water cycles.

What are you working on now and how has participating in the Thinking the City initiative influenced you?

In many things: a project with the poor landscapes of esparto grass in the east of the community of Madrid, the environments of a dam in the Sierra de Huétor surrounding Granada, a project of archaeology of the Islamic landscape in the Tetuán district of Madrid … In the end all these projects are nothing more than an attempt to rethink the built space, the landscapes it generates at different scales, as part of living ecosystems.

Also, in relation to the pieces that were projected in ‘Thinking the city’, on the weekend of February 15-16 we will hold two events in the Chamartin open fields with Ecologists in Action and Carabanchel with the Collective for the Memory of the Carabanchel Prison with the aim of making the city through this other more conscious movement.

Mina Nogueira Álvarez

He has participated in several exhibitions, such as the group show El Escenario Urbano at the Biblioteca del Mar, where he presented a collaborative work on the expropriation of land in the Valencian huerta, and in exhibitions such as Sorolla, una nova dimensió and Dalí Cybernetic, with audiovisual works created using artificial intelligence.

His project explores the interaction between art and urban space, taking the Moncloa Arch as a case study. This Francoist monument, object of graffiti and activities such as skateboarding, is transformed into a recycled wooden toy that allows skating with fingerboards, questioning and resignifying its original function. The installation includes the toy and a video that connects DIY culture with commemorative events, vindicating the citizen’s right to public space. The work addresses issues such as the monument, historical memory and the right to the city, using strategies such as play and reappropriation of the everyday environment.

What is your biggest concern about the contemporary city from your own perspective as an artist?

My biggest concern is how the contemporary city, with its functional and accelerated design, has been losing its sensibility and its ability to connect with its inhabitants. I am concerned about how gentrification, privatization of public space and indifference to small urban mistakes affect the quality of life and social cohesion. As an artist, I seek to make these problems visible and propose alternatives that invite us to reflect on our relationship with the urban environment.

What has it meant in your career to participate in this ART U READY initiative?

Participating in ART U READY has been a deeply enriching experience. It has allowed me to integrate my artistic practice into a broader dialogue about the city and its dynamics, sharing reflections with other artists and viewers. It has also been a platform to make my work visible and reaffirm my commitment to the re-signification of public space through art.

What do you see as the idyllic urban landscape of the near future?

I imagine an urban landscape where the public regains its prominence, a space that encourages interaction, inclusion and well-being of its inhabitants. In this future, cities will not only be functional, but also responsive, designed to embrace diversity and strengthen communities.

What are you working on now and what has participating in the Think the City initiative influenced?

I am currently exploring new ways to re-signify public spaces through the use of play and emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence. Participating in Pensar la Ciudad has consolidated my interest in the dialogue between art, urban space and citizenship. It has inspired me to continue investigating how art can be a tool to foster a more conscious and participatory relationship with our environment.

Sebastián Bayo 

Sebastián Bayo (1990) studied architecture in Madrid, where he participated in the Micras collective. After receiving awards for his final year project, he worked in London and began his artistic career in 2016 with the exhibition Expressions at the Crown House Gallery.

The author returns to Spain to balance his career in architecture and art, adopting an anthropocentric approach in his exhibitions. He has shown his work in Vitoria, Madrid and Barcelona, and continues to train in sculpture, being selected for prominent awards and exhibitions. His work, which presents the image of a city seen from above, symbolizes the human impact on the territory and the relationship between the natural and the artificial, questioned in the Anthropocene era. Through a system of tessellation, he creates an urban and mineralogical landscape, with an organic form that reflects the transformation of the environment by human action, using plaster and clay to represent this continuous transformation.

What is your greatest concern about the contemporary city from your own perspective as an artist?

The contemporary city offers an infinite field of reflection, both as an artist, architect and citizen. Some of these concerns are very concrete, others, fortunately, have a much more poetic character. My major poetic concern about the contemporary city is how the boundaries between the natural and the artificial have become blurred in the context of the Anthropocene. As an artist, I am interested in reflecting on how human impact transforms the landscape, not from an apocalyptic vision, but by exploring the organic interconnection between the urban, the mineral and the biological. I try with my work to poeticize this transformation, working on how the materials and forms of cities reflect a new geological and social reality, marked by the scale of our actions as a planetary force.

What has it meant in your career to participate in this ART U READY initiative?

Participating in the ART U READY initiative has really been a milestone in my artistic career. From the start, the call for proposals was presented to me as a stimulating excuse to reflect and delve into ideas that, otherwise, I might not have approached in the same way and that I now feel as very relevant in my present and future work. Specifically, this experience represented for me a return to explore the border area between art and architecture, a line of work that I am passionate about and that I have continued to develop in greater depth since then. Anthropocene, the work I made, was also a challenge from a productive and logistical point of view, as it is one of the largest scale works I have produced to date and was created specifically for the call. Shaping it forced me to experiment with new materialization and installation strategies that have broadened my work perspectives.

I also consider that it has been very enriching for my career the contact with the rest of the artists selected in the call, as well as with the members of the organization and the jury. Last but not least, it has been a pleasure to exhibit the piece in such a unique space as the greenhouse of The Sibarist, an absolutely spectacular setting for an exhibition and with a convening power that was evident on the opening day.

What do you see as the idyllic cityscape of the near future?

The idyllic urban landscape of the future is a fascinating topic, especially now that we see so many projects about futuristic cities in development, such as those being built in countries like Saudi Arabia. My vision of an ideal city, however, is probably not so much focused on ultra-technological concepts, but rather on recovering and improving fundamental aspects that existed in the city ‘of the past’ and are being neglected.

For me, scale is the key factor that should guide any urban planning, especially the scale of the neighborhood, of the environment within the city where we actually develop daily life. My ideal urban landscape is one that allows us to walk to carry out day-to-day activities, such as going to the supermarket, taking the kids to school or getting to work. I believe that designing cities on a human scale, focused on proximity, promotes a more sustainable, healthy and connected life with the environment.

Another aspect that I consider important not to neglect in the urban landscape of the future is first floor living. The route through the streets should be full of activity, with businesses, stores and workshops instead of so many tourist homes that dehumanize the city. I believe that the streets should be cared for, the public spaces of quality, creating urban fabrics that intermingle with the green, natural fabrics that allow the city to breathe and refresh itself, diluting a bit that vision of the artificial, hard, ‘unnatural’ city.

What are you working on now and how has participating in the Thinking the City initiative influenced you?

The truth is that I am currently developing different projects in parallel, both artistic, architectural and educational. I think that all of them have been influenced in one way or another by my experience in Pensar la Ciudad, but there is one in particular in which the influence is very clear. After the success of the call for ART U READY and with the recent theme of study of the city, I participated in the International Biennial of Architecture of Euskadi Mugak, where my proposal “Utopia, forbidden to pass” has won and will be built in the Plaza de la Virgen Blanca in Vitoria-Gasteiz.

It is a four-meter wall that divides the square, suggesting that utopia is always behind and questioning the very existence of borders and walls that do not stop being built today, 35 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. A wall as a storyteller of utopias, which at the same time incites citizen intervention, welcoming on itself all the reflections and expressions of those who pass by it during the coming months of October and November. Needless to say, you are all invited to participate.

Julia Grunberg

Julia Grunberg (1988) is a visual artist from Madrid who explores human behavior in interior spaces through installation, intervention, drawing and painting. She has received several awards, including the Ayudas de Creación INJUVE, with which she developed mobile devices that treat space as a dynamic body.

His work includes important exhibitions such as El Chico (2021) and in Mexico City (2022), where he explored the architecture of Mario Pani. Trained in Interior Architecture and with a master’s degree from Parsons, he has participated in prominent projects, such as the renovation of the San Marcos Convent in León. His work 50% Cotton, 50% Plaster examines the relationship between the intimacy of interior space and urban public space, using clotheslines as a symbol of this connection. The installation rescues the tradition of urban clotheslines, reflecting the daily life, especially of women who performed domestic chores. In a context of urban modernization that erases these community vestiges, the work seeks to re-humanize the urban environment, highlighting the evolving role of women and celebrating the diversity of cities.

What is your greatest concern about the contemporary city from your own perspective as an artist?

How domestic intimacy and everyday life manifest and coexist in the public community space of the urban environment, in a growing modern city that tends to the impersonal and dehumanized.

What has it meant in your career to participate in this ART U READY initiative?

Expanding my way of reflecting on human behavior in interior spaces and the impact this can have on the urban scale. To push me to explore new forms of plastic representation and to exchange different ways of thinking about the city with other artists.

What do you see as the idyllic urban landscape of the near future?

A landscape that embraces imperfections, nourished by the diversity and particularities of the city.

What are you working on now and how has participating in the Thinking the City initiative influenced you?

I am delving deeper into painting and how it merges with my exploration of spaces and installation. Thinking the City has enriched my way of communicating and reflecting on relevant issues in our society, helping me to generate a dialogue about the future we want to build.

Bárbara Pérez Marina

Bárbara Pérez (1977), architect and since 2017 also dedicated to sculpture, integrating her work with architecture and urbanism, focusing on nature and water.

The artist’s work focuses on studying natural forms, avoiding orthogonality and rationalizing curves, while questioning current construction practices and their environmental impact. She collaborates with artisans to materialize her pieces, valuing the transmission of artisanal knowledge. His works seek to integrate art into urbanism, using rainwater harvesting to mitigate droughts and floods and attract flora and fauna. He has participated in exhibitions and competitions, such as the Arco Fair with Espacio Valverde in 2023 and 2024. The work uses Roman techniques with lime mortar, working with master craftsman Luis Prieto and tools made from recycled materials. The technique allows it to adapt to different geometric combinations in the urban space.

What is your greatest concern about the contemporary city from your own perspective as an artist?

To enhance nature, not to invalidate the coexistence with other species. To better balance materials without destroying the earth that lies beneath what we build. Developing education is the only way to improve the behavior of those who inhabit it. Take better care and throw away less. I don’t think that growing every year a little bit is feasible.

What has it meant in your career to participate in this ART U READY initiative?

It is an experience to move the piece to a different environment, it is one of those few special spaces that manage to survive in the city, I wish there were more places like this, with so much character and so well maintained over time. It is the kind of hidden corner that makes cities into places.

What do you see as the idyllic urban landscape of the near future?

For me the interesting thing is to live with more trees, plants, water, bees, birds, squirrels…. I don’t think cities should be only for our species. Nature is so well made because it has infinite time to perfect itself, always trying one more time. We have more limited time, yet we can do better.

What are you working on now and how has participating in the Think the City initiative influenced you?

I will continue as I have been working on how to manage rainwater. Both when it rains little and there are droughts or a lot and there are floods. It is about not drowning when it rains and when it does not. We have experienced a great disaster in Valencia. We cannot continue to generate impermeable surfaces that do not drain every time we build without thinking about what is underneath, in particular limiting the use of concrete, asphalt, oil. I will continue to work on those small portions of accumulated water as long as possible. On how to slow down the drop of rainwater to the sewer. How to manage water occupies the human being from the beginning.

ARTISTS:

Carme Aliaga

Daniel Barrios

Sebastían Bayo

Paula Botella

Solange Contreras

Delfina Inés Di Giacomo y Wanda Acevedo

Julia Grunberg

Stephanie Herr

Rodrigo Moreno

Mina Nogueira

Bárbara Pérez

Chema Rodriguez

Dayana Trigo