Carlota Santamaría is a participatory installation artist and experiential designer. Her practice examines the relationship between inner experience and the world we inhabit.

She creates authored experiential systems that bring sculptural environments, sound, objects, and collective actions into dialogue. Participants’ gestures and decisions shape how the work unfolds, giving questions about how we perceive, think, and relate a material and social form that can be inhabited and questioned.

Drawing on sustained investigations into ritual and inner experience, and more than two decades of design and creative direction, Santamaría composes situations in which participants’ contributions become the work’s material, structure, and meaning. Her installations invite us to examine how the realities we take for granted are rehearsed and sustained through our own participation.

Her work has been presented at the New Museum in New York, Palais Galliera in Paris, MoMu in Antwerp, and CCCB and CaixaForum in Barcelona, among others.

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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.