16 April 2024
Paula Valero Comín
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Paula Valero Comín (born 1976, Valencia) is a Spanish transdisciplinary artist and cultural producer. She graduated from the College of Fine Arts of Valencia (2001) and the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux Arts de Paris (ENSBA, 2006), with a doctorate in research between performance and activism.
She works in different mediums—drawing, public intervention, video installation, organisation of actions, research projects and curating—and is interested in art’s contribution to the collective imagination, as well as its ability to transform situations and realities.
For When Solidarity Is Not a Metaphor, Paula Valero Comín is presenting two works entitled The Rosa Luxemburg Resistant Herbarium and Manifestation Végétale (2022-ongoing).
The Rosa Luxemburg Resistant Herbarium and Manifestation Végétale interweave Rosa Luxemburg’s botanical practice with contemporary themes of resistance and urban ecology. Inspired by her personal herbarium, the work is conceived as a continuation of what Rosa Luxembourg worked on throughout her life. Indeed, the herbarium was created during her imprisonment to express her attention to all forms of life. Valero's work extends this grand gesture of resistance into a contemporary art form, while establishing a genealogy between a number of remarkable women, often forgotten by history, and the plants that mostly flourish in the wild.
Originating in 2020, this evolving project spans cities like Palermo, Buenos Aires, Bilbao, Valencia, and Havana, exploring urban flora and women’s fundamental contribution to the protection of the various manifestations of life. Each iteration grows from local plant life observation and the stories of women’s caretaking, forming a transnational narrative of persistence and a long, unbroken chain of care transmission from one woman to another.
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