María Castellanos and Alberto Valverde
1 January 2018 – 02 July 2018
Artist and researcher, she is a graduate of Fine Arts from the University of Vigo, where she is currently completing her thesis La piel biónica. Membranas tecnológicas como interfaces corporales en la práctica artística. Where she investigates about the technological prosthesis, focusing on the hybridizations among cyborgs and wearables, as a paradigm of expanding of the human sensorial capabilities.
Her work has been selected in numerous competitions and won several awards among which stand out the Artista Revelación del Principado de Asturias award in 2008, Premio Tentaciones 2011 – Feria Estampa, Madrid – or the Alnorte 2012 production grant, as well as the Astragal award 2013 which she produced the corpo-realidadproject.
She has participated in numerous exhibitions, national and international, being present in countries like Portugal, Argentina, Colombia, Australia and Japan. Among the most recent samples there are Eidos da Imaxe in the MARCO de Vigo museum and corpo-realidad en CS-LAB of the Zokei University, Tokio.
Alberto Valverde, artist and technologist. With a wide experience in system design, creation of interactive and multimedia environments, web design and robotics.
He has taught various multimedia materials of the Bachelor of Fine Arts at the University of Vigo and is currently in the Master of Animation and Audiovisual Illustrated book at the same university.
In his work, Valverde investigates about chaos as way of order, proposing the creation of random vectors. At the same time he pays special attention to the relationship between man and machine.
In 2010 he received the first prize of the 11th Muestra Internacional Unión Fenosa. Organized by MAC de A Coruña, due to the interactive installation Reflejos y Antireflejos. His work has also been awarded in Tentaciones 2011 –Estampa. Madrid– and in AlNorte 2012. He has also been selected in numerous competitions, among them; stand out the El premio de Grabado Máximo Ramos de Ferrol, Lúmen_Ex – Premios de Arte Digital de la Universidad de Extremadura–, as well as the XLIV Certamen Nacional de Arte de Luarca, Asturias.
His recent exhibitions include Relacions/Interactions in the Verge Gallery in Sydney and Desenho na Universidade Hoje, in Porto, Portugal.
Project in residence
The Plant Sense
The Plant Sense is one of the winning projects of the VERTIGO STARTS call. The artists have developed their proposal within the research of the University of Lübek, Flora Robotica. Flora Robotica aims to investigate the symbiotic relationships between robots and natural plants, and to explore the potential of a robot-plant partnership capable of producing architectural artefacts and living spaces. María Castellanos and Alberto Valverde’s artistic project aims to build a portable device that allows us to connect with plants in order to forge new human-plant bonds.
