Elisa Cuesta
29 July 2019 – 12 September 2019
Elisa Cuesta is an artist and designer who works on the integration of technology in society and nature, addressing issues such as the value of data, information infrastructures and the figure of the diagram as a tool for speculation and knowledge generation.
In addition to her artistic production, she has coordinated and produced several initiatives at the intersection between art, science and digital cultures, such as the Tentacular Festival (Matadero Madrid) or the Audiovisual Art Exhibition Madatac (Madrid). Her interest in learning with others led her to become a graphic designer at Medialab-Prado, the citizen laboratory in Madrid, and one of the driving forces behind AIDI, a collective project that promotes design, research and innovation practices based on collaborative processes. She has a degree in Industrial Design and Fine Arts from Nebrija University (Madrid) and is currently studying for a master’s degree in Artistic Research at the Royal Academy of Arts in The Hague.
Her work has been shown at the Centre for the Promotion of Science in Belgrade, Cervantes Gallery (Belgrade), Science Gallery Dublin, Quartair (The Hague), LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial (Gijón), Sala de Arte Joven (Madrid) and Sala Borrón (Oviedo). She has been recognised with the Asturias Youth Prize 2019 for Young Visual Artists and the 11th LABjoven_Los Bragales Production Prize.
Project in residence
Skeens
Skeens (from the English skin [skin] and screen [screen]) is an artistic response in a speculative key to the pathological state of distraction and subjective disintegration that individuals experience in our existence connected to the network.
Using private data from the last 10 years, which one of the most important social networks makes available to its users, the artist proposes an exercise in decoding and subsequent materialization of her information.
During his residency he will prototype different textile materializations, each of them corresponding to one of the three categories of records found after a first analysis of the dataset: self-editing, those data corresponding to the actions voluntarily generated by the user to design their profile, interaction, the corresponding to the actions of communication and exchange with other users, and the social network’s own records, intrinsic to the operation of the platform, usually for analytical and/or commercial purposes.
Faced with the obligation of self-design and the pressure of self-referentiality in the extended present, Skeens demands his own space and time, which allow the construction of self-narratives from memory, understanding and finitude.
Skeens is the winning project of the XI LABjoven_Los Bragales Production Grant.
