Following our goal of promoting transdisciplinary research, we participate in different projects in which we incorporate artistic vision into the creation and dissemination of scientific knowledge made at IBEC.
Roser Cusso
In this space, illustrator-in-residence Roser Cussó will share her impressions during the different creative phases of the Human Landscapes Laboratory project.
“The Laboratory of Human Landscapes” project aims to focus on the human environments that science has not yet finished defining and which still remain far from rational knowledge”.
Imagination and fiction, as research tools, can help us building fictitious spaces to draw the invisible. Through this artistic research, we want to find new starting points on which new narratives can be built.
I am starting the artistic residency at IBEC
These first few weeks I am interviewing researchers, while doing fieldwork around the center’s facilities. My research aims to discover which environments and geographical spaces of our body are being investigated by IBEC scientists. Do they resemble the landscapes we have on earth or distant planets?
Corridors/labs/meetings
The number of meetings with scientists is increasing. Right now, good orientation is very necessary to find the labs and offices of the research groups in the long corridors of the IBEC. It’s time to familiarize myself with the specific scientific vocabulary of each group and understand the work processes they use.
Symposium at the Hotel Alimara
On Wednesday 19th October I attended the 15th IBEC Bioengineering Symposium. It was a good opportunity to meet many people with whom we have met virtually and with whom we have pending meetings. Many of the presentations revealed to me many projects still unknown to me at IBEC. It was the moment to decide to narrow the study frame of the fieldwork and to be aware that I cannot get to know all the research groups in depth. Research must be prioritized.
Artistic research
After numerous meetings with researchers to learn about their work and objects of study, the stage of artistic research begins. This phase is nourished by the meetings, conversations and analysis of the material related to the scientists’ research areas.
Artificial environments
Artistic research advances and becomes a look that awakens speculative worlds, the vast majority artificially created in laboratories and on a micro scale. In my laboratory I also work in a small format, at the moment, in each paper I concentrate variations of the same starting point. Shapes and colors in different positions become views of the same space.
Artificial lives
Small organisms inhabit laboratory cultures. Unique structures that walk in their habitats without knowing that they are being observed. Their life expectancy can vary within the laboratory (hours or days) but in this image they are embodied for eternity.
Workshops with the scientific community
During one day I carried out two workshops with scientists from IBEC. We followed the same steps as in my artistic research. The concepts worked with the scientists will serve to expand the vocabulary of the artistic look in order to find new solutions on the scientific material.