Plug-in Habitat
2 September 2022 – 02 November 2022
Paula Nishijima is a visual artist with a practice based on investigating the intersections between life science, technology and participatory social practice. She investigates the collective and self-organised behaviour of swarms in nature, and how it inspires more collaborative, sustainable and ethical forms of relationship between humans, non-humans and the environment.
Recent exhibitions include The Nature of the Cities Festival, online, 2021; Here and Now, Media Art Friesland, Leeuwarden, The Netherlands (Young Masters Award Nomination), 2021; Teachable Moment, Stove Works, Chattanooga, Tennessee, USA, 2020; Mutant Institute of Environmental Narratives, Madrid, Spain, 2019.
She holds an MA in Art and Culture from Leiden University, The Netherlands, and a BA in Visual Arts from Universidade Estadual Paulista Júlio de Mesquita Filho, São Paulo/Brazil.
Project in residence
Plug-in Habitat
Paula Nishijima will develop in Asturias the artistic research of her project Plug-in Habitat. The artist will be inspired by nature to create interconnected habitats. Through “biodesign-imaginative”, Nishijima will use as models plants that serve as shelter for other species or that have properties to adapt to environmental changes. The artist will imagine possible architectures of the future, modular constructions that could be attached to other organism(s) and connected to each other.
Plug-in Habitat constitutes a superorganism composed of several parts that relate to each other in a symbiotic way, adapting together to changes in the environment.
The project speculates on the concept of the “symbiotic cyborg”, whose technological appendage is at the service of the “other” rather than the individual to which it is attached.
The artist will collaborate with the Asturian architect Marlén López, director of Laboratorio Biomimético, a research and training space in Ladines. The Redes Natural Park will be the place where the two will begin their research. Nishijima will then work at LABoral Centro de Arte’s fabLAB to fabricate these adaptive structures that will be presented to the public as an audiovisual installation.
