Lucía Batalla Tuero (Gijón, Spain, 2000) graduated with a degree in Fine Arts from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid (2018 – 2022). Afterwards, she studied for a Master in History of Contemporary Art and Visual Culture (2022 – 2023), coordinated between the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, the UCM and the UAM. During this period she specialized in the division of Theory and Criticism of Art. She is currently in Belgium participating in a European volunteer project for an artistic, cultural citizen center.

Her recent production and lines of research reflect on the idea of ‘nature’, with special attention to the blurring between natural and artificial categories. Her interests resonate with issues such as speculative fabulation, the problematization of the nature / culture binomial, the recognition of the agency of the non-human and the displacement of anthropocentrism. Plant otherness and its complexity are her main object of study.

Observing typical mechanical ways of making, the artist produces a series of artifacts and mechanisms with which she intends to explore the apparent oxymoron of a ‘manufactured nature’. Collecting is a key process within her artistic practice, often thinking based on the materiality of the organic elements she finds, exploring them and observing what movements or rhythms they suggest. Her interest in automatons and the sensation of estrangement that comes from animating the seemingly immobile or inanimate (in this case, the vegetable) is noteworthy.

Resident at LABoral Centro de Arte with her project ‘Autómatas Vegetales’, chosen for the I Convocatoria de Residencias Artísticas 2024. Her stay focused on notions such as the movement of plants, plant-blindness and the third landscape.

Artist participating in the exhibition Terranautas. Notes for a new world map