Patricia Mato-Mora. “Posidònia”

This work consists in an artistic reinterpretation of the sub-aquatic ecosystem situated between the surface of the sea and the seabed, at a Mediterranean harbour. The team at the Foundation has prepared a series of activities related to the project, such as children’s workshops based around the interaction between that which is assumed to be “manmade”, and nature itself (one of the main ideas behind the artist’s work), as well as guided tours. More information can be found on our website.

I am an artist currently exploring the spatial and architectural capabilities of materiality; through sculpture, large-scale installations and site-specific interventions.

Spaces and the life within them provide me with a creative point of departure. Trained as an architect, and with a background in architectural journalism, I am interested in the capacity of spaces to act as vessels for storytelling and collective imagination – it is stories in spaces, not the spaces themselves, that shape human experience.

My works are carefully articulated material interventions that bring an element of surprise or wonder to an otherwise overlooked spatial condition. Necessarily architectural and monumental in scale, my work introduces a subjective narrative that has happened or is about to take place in the space in question, changing its perception altogether.

My current interests lie in manifesting, through my work, ‘the flow of the universe’, that what happens ‘of itself’. I understand the division between man and nature to be illusory: nature is all there is. There is no art, nor architecture – instead, there are man-made works, in the same way that there are termite works. As such, my sculptures are natural occurrences, as necessary to my human condition as a nest is to a bird. Industrial processes themselves are also understood to be natural occurrences that result in large quantities of material production. I am interested in interfering with these processes in order to shape my very own work, which in turn appears to have escaped from the digestive system of industry and colonised our familiar environments.

With regards to the creative process, I am fascinated with how the sheer scale of these interventions challenges the physical engagement that my body has with the material. Upscaling material to engage with architectural space brings together the divide between maker, materiality, spatiality, and the creative act itself that exists in the practice of architecture.