MACAAL Residence – Paola Monzillo – In collaboration with BIENALSUR

As part of its collaboration with the second edition of BIENALSUR, the Museum of African Contemporary Art Al Maaden (MACAAL) is currently hosting a residency project by Paola Monzillo whose artistic practice echoes the ongoing exhibition’s program about materiality in contemporary art.

Trained as visual artist and architect, Paola Monzillo nurtures a passion for cartography. Moving mainly between collage, drawing and installation, the artist sets out to disrupt with her works the supposed neutrality of maps and images, while investigating issues linked to territory, history and representation.

Tapestry, Footprints in the Territory consists of a handmade tapestry made with maps of Latin American cities. The designs allude, on the one hand, to the iconography used in pre-Columbian textiles, and on the other, to the urban morphology diagram derived from the Spanish legislation of the Laws of the Indies. The work encompasses a debate on the dominant discourses, the appropriationism characteristic of cultural conquests and the myths around our own origins and identity.

BIENALSUR is the International Biennale of Contemporary Art of South America organized by the Argentine public university Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero (UNTREF). Its aim is to connect audiences of the five continents and create a global network of institutional associative collaboration in order to erase distances and borders and claim uniqueness in diversity. The first edition of BIENALSUR was launched in 2016 with the”Sur Global” meetings, an international platform for reflection around contemporary art, and continued until the end of 2017 with actions and exhibitions held around the world. Its second edition started last June and will continue until October 2019.