Asturias Circle
Asturias Circle
Site-specific participatory sound installation
What do we lose when a story is forgotten?
Asturias Circle translates Council Circles into a participatory installation exploring collective wisdom, memory, and loss. Approaching Asturias as a newcomer, Carlota Santamaría takes listening as a way of learning from the region and its people.
Participation unfolds through three acts: offering, listening, and sharing. The Circle of Stories presents six recorded accounts in Spanish, English, and Asturianu, forming an intimate portrait of the region through individual lives.
Black-clay sound sculptures, stones from wild beaches, and powdered coal from Asturian mines connect these voices to the region’s coastal landscape and mining history.
At the center, El Cobijo (The Shelter), built from driftwood gathered along the Asturian coast, offers a place to contribute a story anonymously to a digital archive via a QR code. Over the ten-day exhibition, these contributions extend the circle from recorded testimony into a living archive.
The work asks how personal experience enters collective memory, and what it means to hold another person’s story against forgetting.
The invitation
What story would you like to share, good or bad, about something that happened to you in Asturias, changed your life in some way, and that you would not want to be forgotten?
Asturias Circle
Site-specific participatory sound installation
Materials: Black clay, beach stones, driftwood, mirrors, and powdered coal from Asturian mines
Audio: Six MP3 recordings of varying duration, in Spanish, English, and Asturianu
Components: El Cobijo (driftwood shelter), and participatory digital archive
Dimensions: 18m diameter
Activation: Ten days
Venue: Fábrica de Armas de la Vega, Oviedo, Spain
Exhibition: Semana Profesional del Arte de Oviedo
Island Circle
Island Circle — Mallorca
Site-specific participatory sound installation
Can collective wisdom emerge through a participatory art installation?
Island Circle translates Council Circles into a spatial exploration of collective wisdom through listening, reflection, and shared movement.
Seven mirrors with organic edges conceal speakers playing recorded personal stories. Participants encounter their own reflection while listening to another person's account, bringing self-perception into dialogue with another life.
Across English, Spanish, Mallorcan Catalan, and other languages, the work brings a shepherd's account into conversation with experiences of migration and lives connecting Mallorca to the Global South. Together, these voices form an intimate social portrait of the island, opening onto questions of belonging, memory, and what gives a life meaning.
Circles of lime powder mark each listening point. Carried underfoot as participants move between them, the powder traces their passage, gradually completing a larger circle over the three-day exhibition.
At its center, a sculpture combines ceramic, glass, a circular clay form, and fig-tree sticks arranged in a triangle balanced by two seashells. Its equilibrium gives material form to the relationship between the surrounding stories.
Inside a stone house, a chair beneath a fig tree and a QR code invite participants to contribute their own stories to a digital archive, extending the circle through further voices.
The invitation
What story would you like to share, good or bad, that happened to you on the island and changed your life in some way? Perhaps it could only have happened here, in Mallorca.
Island Circle — Mallorca.
Participatory sound installation
Mirrors, recorded voices, lime powder, ceramic, glass, fig-tree sticks, seashells, and digital archive
22m diameter· Three-day activation
WorldWide Storefront 2014
Eva Franch commissioned this short film teaser to promote the first worldwide event organize by Storefront for Art & Architecture. The briefing was clear: promote artistic creation that will happen simultaneous in different parts of the world.. So we had to transmit the idea that during the event anything can happen, anywhere, simultaneously. I co-directed this piece with the mix-media director Lucas Borras. We focus in short sketches that will appeal to the surreal, and the subconscious. We try to undress the scenes from cultural local references, but at the same time integrate elements from opposite poles. Therefore it really didn’t matter where are you, you’ll perceived the vibe of the event. Reaching a wide audience.
Teaser for WorldWide Storefront 2014
A new initiative to provide a simultaneous, multi-locus of alternative spaces around the globe and a digital platform for the expression and exchange of latent desires within contemporary art and architecture practices.
Directed by Carlota Santamaría & Lucas Borrás
Commissioned by Eva Franch & Carlos Mínguez from Storefront for Art and Architecture NY
Music by Jorge Ramirez-Escudero
Black sun
I directed this film pursuing the idea of making a visual art piece, but at the same time it is a fashion film too. I've chosen a vintage Martin Margiela dress as I admire him as a creator who was able to bring art in into fashion in a shameless undisguised way. I guess my first idea has been achieved, as the video has been exhibited in Art festivals ( Incubarte, Close up Vallarta) galleries (Mr. Pink, ULAC), as well as in fashion film festivals ( ASVOFF at Caixa Forum, Hispanic-American Fashion Culture at FIT) For that piece I've work on the following concept. In the Japanese Bunraku Theatre, the puppets come to life through puppeteers dressed in black. The first impression is that the puppet is an inert object that moves at the whim of the artist. But the more you deepen in the play, the characters dressed in black, end up seeping away. They appear to your eyes as slaves of the puppet, moving to the sound of what appear to be the wishes of a doll that gained life.?In this connection we see a reflection of the nature of man and his soul. Homer sees life as a breath and at the same time as a disembodied shadow, the body depends on the halo of soul’s breath to live. Orphisms believes that the soul is not a principle that informs the body and gives him life, but something that’s essentially non-sensitive and not material detached from the body, which seeks to ascend.?In this piece I think about how to visualize if the soul comes down to the body, or the body to the soul.?Is it the soul the one that moves us like marionettes, or it is our body the one that gives a space to the existence of the soul??I articulate this duality by constructing an environment without definite dimensions, and a hypnotic narrative where what we don’t see, the black body, has the same presence and visual force as what can see, the dress.
New. HP Sprout’sworldwide launch
In the event of the HP Sprout's worldwide launch I was invited as a guess creative for a live demonstration. Sprout is a computer that combines the capabilities of
a keyboard, projector, canvas, scanner and 3D camera into one single device. So the main point was combining traditional techniques with the digital world. I did some backgrounds using Suminagashi, and ancient Japanese technique with suspended inks on water. Combine different collage techniques, scissors and digital cutting and watercolors
The whole process was swinging from digital images to actual real objects and their projections overlaying layers of physical and digital objects. The result are Phygital images. That perfectly refer to the trend-forecasting report I've done on August 12' Digital Surrealism and the appearance of a third dimension, the Phygital.
Sim/Stim with Zeitguised
The intention with this video was bringing eroticism to the new Phygital dimension.
I am very excited with this collaboration together with Zeitguised, as it reaches a highly conceptual level of eroticism, which is what I am after at Odiseo. With this work we enter on the realm of Phygital experiences, were the digital and the physical world coexist and we can't stigmatize one or the other, as they melt without borders.
Zeitguised worked the entire piece through CGI, and yet the models look so present. Their starting point was a real body to generate our Digital model. Society always has fantasized about hologram lovers, and 3D muses, and we personally think we haven't seen anything before that looks as real as Zeitguised sim/stim work. I always have admired Zeitguised work, and follow their career for the last years. I consider Zeitguised studio a pioneer on the new vision on CGI, cross-pollinating technology and art. It has been a great pleasure to finally work together with them through Odiseo.
Concept, Art Direction & Design: Zeitguised with Chris Hoffmann
Creative Direction - Zeitguised with Albert Folch & Carlota Santamaria for Odiseo
Imaging & Animation: Chris Hoffmann
Sound: Superimposed Void - Want (Good Price Rec.)
Zeitguised statement on the piece:
"Shifting between auto-eroticism and material fetish, ‘sim | stim’ proposes a cargo cult of sensual nano-alchemy. It celebrates temporary mummification of the body by engaging in an erotic relationship with shape changing clouds of synthetic material.
Touching on the topics of body enhancement and death through preservation, sexual attraction is being conserved in floating silicone bubbles; flesh is suspended in ersatz aspic, comparable to an ‘inverse boob job’."
Odiseo vol.4
The creative direction role in Odiseo vol 4 has a accomplish one more step commissioning the video for the release to an outstanding creative studio as Zeitguised, the stills from the video become the interlace pages of the book. For the photographic work we invited Jonathan Schofield, Stella McCartney ‘s creative director, who presented a visual essay base in some found photographs, and the cross boundaries of intimacy and public spheres.
I’ve worked with the stylist Raquel Franco and the Photographer Alex Franco on a piece about feminine old school seduction. And invited Olya Olelnic to work on a series that explore the beauty of color and texture under a modern view of African inspiration.
Odiseo vol.3
We worked in 4 different areas for this volume. On the content of the publication, the cover, the special collaboration, and the presentation at Do you read me?! Berlin. This volume, Albert Folch and I wanted to reaffirm the fact that Odiseo works eroticism from a conceptual point of view. So we worked on creating a balance in between natural eroticism from Marc Regas story, constructed eroticism from the graphic nudes in Olya's work, and the conceptual eroticism from Max & Patrick view on Italian women. We worked extensively on editing Marc's photos, to create a black and white melody as a José Gonzalez song. I met with Max & Patrick to personally discuss about our take on eroticism the way it can be translated to images and put ideas together, the result is a story were there is barely a couple of nudes but highly charged erotic women are portrayed, an Ode to Italian women. We also worked with Olya, on moodboards, inspiration and back stories that build her powerful emotional story about women's sexual growth. The culmination of this volume 3 was a presentation at Do You Read me Berlin?! Albert Folch talked about the project as a whole and into the Editorial scene, Oriol Mogas explained the Editorial text content, and I did the presentation on Odiseo's take on erotica and it's foundations. The special collaboration was comissioned to Aparatu, a ceramic artist and the teaser to Pensacola. The chosen cover expresses the aim of Odiseo of not being gender restricted as well as the concept that eroticism is not base on what you see but what your mind projects.
Apartamento: A borrowed place
It is said there are magnetic cores on the earth, and similarly, in every story it appears to be a vital centre.
Houses, corners, a bench, the fifth floor of an office building, a bar, the road back, a boat, a table in a café… Anonymous corners of a street, places you can't choose, in which your life bends its way along transcendentally.
Spaces that drain the time like a large hourglass. Gradually and imperceptibly, with gentlest subtlety, they change your existence. The first day you arrived there, you were somebody you merley recognise on some old picture found by surprise.
Unit 8, 3 Glebe road has never been my home or a choice. It has nevertheless witnessed my life for 6 years.
The hostesses have been changing and I have continued to visit regardless.
Friendships from adolescence, childhood ties, strangers who will be my future partners, friends who I have yet to meet; they have all been living in this place. I’ve slept alone, yet also in the company of the three great loves of a life.
I’ve arrived lost and become even more so. But I’ve also taken more decisions than I’m aware of in this borrowed home. I'm not sure why it seems as if thoughts become more clear with two feet planted on this old wooden floor. Whenever the door is open to me, I’m assaulted by intimate memories in a borrowed place.
