Damien Poulain is an artist working in design, architecture and the built and natural environments. His practice transmutes influences from Shintoist, primitive and heraldic symbology, as well as contemporary material and digital culture, to propose a universal visual language. Through an evolving range of formats including textiles, painting, sculpture, and ephemeral architectural volumes, he devises glyphic systems of geometry and colour. These codes raise questions about the ways in which humans relate to each other, to their surroundings, and to the mystery of existence.

Poulain’s work is nomadic and contextual in nature and ranges from monumental interventions to small-scale paintings, which he produces in ongoing series linked to place and time. In addition to public spaces, which are Poulain’s preferred canvas, his work has been displayed in solo exhibitions in London’s Kemistry Gallery and KK Outlet; in Tokyo at Calm and Punk Gallery and Claska; and in group exhibitions at the Museum of Graphic Design in Breda, Holland, and the 21_21 Museum in Tokyo.

Loca People (What the F**k). 6 sewn fabric banners. 93 x 59 cm. each 2016.

Loca People (What the Fuck!) is a techno song by the Spanish DJ Sak Noël. This song is a hymn to celebration, to hedonism, to freedom without responsibility. In a certain sense, some of the elements that have characterized certain activity of the island for decades. The artist’s intention is to create a dialogue between two opposing cultures and traditions in a limited and reduced space like that of Ibiza. A world in danger of extinction that refers to textile manufacturing, and another, such as electronic music, dictated by the powerful entertainment industry, Poulain uses the banners to play with their main relevance, with their main utility, the strength of the sign and the symbol, to create the banners of the true kingdom of electronic music: Ibiza.

The Birth of the Emoticon. Pictorial and sculptural installation. Variable measures. 2022.

Following the line of research that he carried out during his residency in 2016, Jesús de Miguel traces a unique itinerary in the history of the symbol. A path that takes you from the cave paintings to the current emoticons. His neo-pictograms respond to the contemporary collapse and the limitation of reducing the expression of emotions or complex concepts to simple icons. The artist creates his own symbols, he does not reproduce them, and offers them to the viewer so that he can give them meaning. An artist with his own original semantics who gives the public the task of actively imagining a world.

Artist and cultural manager. Founder and director of La Juan Gallery, the first gallery in Spain dedicated to the living arts. Its practice centres around overhauling the clichés associated with performance art and creating networks between artists and the public out of its contents. He has collaborated with institutions such as the Instituto Cervantes, Central Saint Martins (London), Teatros del Canal (Madrid), Cidade da Cultura (Santiago de Compostela) and Matadero (Madrid), among others.

Oral Tradition. Performance made the day of the preview of this exhibition. Audio documenting said action. 2022.

Oral tradition transmits knowledge and experiences to those who listen to it. When Juan Gómez Alemán arrived at the Ses12naus residence in 2016, he interviewed some men and women from Ibiza for his project, asking them about the origin of the island and what events had made it what it is now. Six years after that experience, it is Gómez Alemán himself who tries to orally transmit what that coexistence was like, an important event in the artist’s creative path that he now wants to share with us through this performance.

Pou d’es Lleó. Composición musical. 6’02’’. 2016.

‘And I came to play. With my limits. With the limits of the island. In search of freedom. To free the music from the subject. To free myself from me. To capture in spite of myself. More than my own ideas. The rhythm of the air. The saturation of white. The harmonics of light. To return its space to silence. Isolated. Drowned in the noise. To collect the silence of nature. To collect the notes of silence. To return them to the sea. Mediterranean.’

She has recently held exhibitions at Espacio 23 Miami, Art and Social Unrest in the Jorge M. Perez Collection; the Momenta Biennale de l’Image in Montreal, and the A4 Art Museum in Chengdu, China, and her work features in the public and institutional collections of the Musée du Quai Branly - Jacques Chirac, France; Museo del Banco de la República, Colombia; Pérez Art Museum in Miami, Colección Jorge M. Pérez; and Les Rencontres de la Photographie d’Arles, France.

Ca eivissenc. Photography. C-print hand made. 110 x 110 cm. 2016.

The artist often focuses on themes of morality, vulnerability and destiny, while remaining committed to capturing hidden aspects of life today, invisible or unknown elements that she perceives through a deep interest in extreme states, human experience and by the depth of the mind. The photographic series that Biswell made in residence are nourished by this sensitivity, stimulated by the new context of the island, to analyze the ancestral and mystical character of Ibiza based on a series of images that she works as magical symbols.

Hotel Utopia. Video that includes a participatory action. 8’ 48’’. 2018.

Hotel Utopia is a project that starts from the ruined structure of a building that was going to be a hotel in Ibiza and was conceived by the renowned architect Josep Lluis Sert. The construction project began in 1969 and was stopped in the 1970s, being completely abandoned after Sert’s death in 1983. To date, the fate of the ruin remains uncertain. The video collects the ephemeral and participatory intervention that was carried out in that structure, paying homage to Sert’s architecture and, more generally, to the ideas, the utopian promises and the dreams of a modernity that becomes a metaphor for dissatisfaction and the unresolved contradictions it contains. The goal is not to give a negative view of the building, but to bring out parts of the structure through the act of painting, giving it an abstract and timeless feel, as if the building is suspended between its past and its future.