Paola Torres Núñez del Prado Singing Textiles




Paola Torres Núñez del Prado, PE/SE Sonified Disruptions Of The Social Fabric

Paola Torres Núñez del Prado researches upon craft transdisciplinarity and complex thought, working with soft sculptures, textiles and embroidery, sound and human voice, text, painting, digital media, interactive art, artificial intelligence, performance and video. She starts by exploring the limits of the sensorial experience, in order to examine notions of interpretation, translation and misrepresentation from a social perspective to portray cultural clashes as glitches on the fabric of the hierarchies that conform our social structures (and our minds).

Contemporary technology and pre-Columbian worldviews intertwine: part of her research involves the development of textile controllers and soft sculptures with haptic and sonic characteristics, where concept, interface and multi-sensory experience are integrated in layers of both virtual and physical codes, embedded in fiber materials that end up recontextualized and endowed with novel properties, as in the series of works that involve smart textiles, questioning the prevailing history of technology that attributes to the West and to the male the apparent exclusivity regarding the origins of the computer and telecommunications, placing different human knowledge in a hierarchical order, where indigenous thought - one who sees the earth as a mother, vision never needed more than by now - is taken as "primitive" and inferior and characteristics as fragility or softness, associated with the feminine, are considered, under this same look, as qualities without greater utility, as a weakness or an error.

Ripped fabrics and soft sculptures tell us stories that have remained incomplete until now. Paola Torres, by reintroducing these silenced voices, fills up this void by embedding them back in textile frameworks whose looms, subsequently automated, served to inspire the first computer model. Through the emphasis on the designs that encode memories from immemorial times in patterns, Torres refers to the structure of the human mind beyond culture.