Credits photo: Núria Grau
From March 10 to 26, Living Together, the new artistic installation by Barcelona-based artist and CRiEDO member Gemma París, can be visited.
The work is displayed in the lobby of the Barcelona Biomedical Research Park (PRBB) and showcases the outcome of her artistic residency at the Department of Medicine and Life Sciences of Pompeu Fabra University (UPF), within the programme jointly promoted with the Vila Casas Foundation.
The exhibition features around one hundred drawings encapsulated in Petri dishes, a material commonly used in laboratories to culture microorganisms. This format reflects the artist’s wish to “make the small visible” and to explore, through visual language, elements that often go unnoticed.
For five months, París immersed herself in the everyday life of biomedical research at the PRBB, working alongside teams studying embryonic development, the evolution of human populations, and cellular processes at a microscopic scale. Direct contact with the research and with a “scientific language that is often hermetic” served as inspiration to develop a project seeking to “understand what we cannot see but which exists within us”.
Working with ink and markers in her studio at Fabra i Coats – Creation Factory, París reinterpreted real scientific images through an artistic lens that highlights the role of imagination in knowledge. As she explains, both artists and researchers share processes such as trial and error, observation, and hypothesis formulation.
Through this dialogue between disciplines, the artist created around one hundred pieces that highlight relevant details identified by the research staff. The result is an installation that invites the public to look closely and rediscover what normally remains hidden to the naked eye. As Jaume Bertranpetit, coordinator of the initiative at UPF, states, the work offers “an original perspective that allows us to approach research through the evocative power of art”.
The Artist in Residence programme is an initiative of the UPF Department of Medicine and Life Sciences together with the Vila Casas Foundation, created in 2020 to promote the intersection between contemporary art and science. Gemma París is the third selected artist, following Pep Vidal (2024) and Jo Milne (2023).
