Paratext #92 with Amanda Triano, Ricardo Trigo, Duncan Gibbs and Oriol Arnedo Casas

Paratext is a monthly series of presentations by artists in residence at Hangar and artists involved in its various residency and grant programmes. Through a range of formats, the sessions host projects, research and ongoing working processes, approaching presentation as a space for circulation and exchange rather than as an instance of final outcome or exhibition. Open to the public, these gatherings seek to foster interaction between the artists and the local context.

The next Paratext session will take place on Tuesday, November 10, at 7 p.m. in Hangar’s Sala Ricson.

Projects will be presented by:

Amanda Triano (XI Hangar Artistic Research Grant)

Amanda Triano explores the transformation of Nature and matter through sculpture, creating petrified and deserted scenes through the use of concrete, which she conceives as a geological surface emblematic of the challenges of our contemporary era and as a medium capable of revealing the alterity of the world around us. Her practice examines the complex and often contradictory ways in which human beings relate to the natural realm, weaving encrypted narratives that engage with science fiction, mythology, Indigenous thought, occultism, and industrial evolution.

Through sculpture, found objects, visual systems, and installation, Triano evokes transmutational and cosmological movements linked to experiences of territory, deterioration, and regeneration. Her work reflects on the collapse of time, ruin, and obsolescence, where vulnerability unfolds simultaneously as descent and ascent. She conceives the exhibition as a medium and an ecosystem, establishing interdependencies between the works and the contexts that host them. Through processes of gathering, fusion, firing, and reconstruction, she animates what would otherwise remain inert, producing images and objects that function as conduits of memory and meaning.

At Paratext, she will present Malas Hierbas, a research project developed during her residency at Hangar. The project explores the casting of industrial packaging moulds designed to protect short-lived technology. By reproducing the cavities they leave behind, autonomous forms emerge that no longer serve the protective function for which the moulds were originally designed. In doing so, the project questions notions of value and utility in contexts of obsolescence and disposal.

Ricardo Trigo (Research and Experimentation Grant at the Hangar Interaction Lab – Barcelona Crea 2026)

Ricardo Trigo’s work brings together artistic practice and research around the material and symbolic conditions through which technology and energy shape artistic production. From a post-conceptual perspective, he explores the relationships between the computational paradigm and art, paying particular attention to the ways scientific and technical discourses colonize the artistic field itself.

Since 2018, he has been developing a research project that considers artistic production as a form of free energy: a non-utilitarian process in which matter, information, and affect are organized as an open system of possibilities. His practice unfolds through the dissolution of boundaries between object, subject, and medium, granting everyday and industrial materials—such as plastics, fuels, electricity, and fastening elements—an expanded epistemological and ontological dimension. He understands aesthetics as a form of knowledge capable of challenging established hierarchies and bringing diverse categories into relation within a shared plane of experience.

At Paratext, La montaña y el túnel (2026) continues with a project exploring the notion of “drilling technologies”, conceiving of drilling as a paradoxical operation that cuts across different systems of production and thought. Following an initial formal and material exploration, the research now shifts towards a presentation featuring three readings by Eduardo Alonso Pérez de Ágreda, an engineer specialising in rock mechanics and underground excavation; Kinkinella, an artist and researcher whose practice brings together free and open technologies, biohacking and collective experimentation; and Ricardo Trigo himself. Together, the three interventions propose a performative approach to the convergences and frictions between geology, technology, the body, language and aesthetic experience.

Duncan Gibbs (Artistic Research and Methodological Experimentation Grant – Barcelona Crea 2026)

Duncan Gibbs is a visual artist based in Barcelona. Duncan’s practice is situated in and around the mulching layer: the strata where materials are chewed up and digested before being regurgitated into their component parts. Working at the edges of sculpture, installation, video and image-making, his practice is rooted in a material exploration of the unstable boundary between biological and geological time. Focusing on the peripheral places of stagnation where human and non-human systems quietly overlap.

Often using discarded and living materials that are regarded as waste, he adopts the role of a gardener or caretaker, maintaining installations that always hover on the cusp of collapse. Mosquitos, algae and yeasts are all treated as collaborators and allowed their own agency to shift the trajectory of a work. Fermentation, preservation and desiccation become tools for stretching out the lifespan of materials, attempting to compress geological time into a human timeframe. Works often develop over years and continue to gestate even after they have been shown. Waiting becomes an active process in shaping a practice that is driven by accident, failure and prolonged observation. Leaving artworks to accumulate layers of history which are later preserved as films, images, residues and anecdotes.

At Paratext, he will present Recipes from a Series of Preservation Experiments, a project that builds on Midden, in which he explored ways of creating sculptural materials that fluctuated between the biological and the geological, the inert and the living. By stretching out the timeframe in which food waste broke down, the project sought to interrupt, hijack and prolong processes of decomposition.

Oriol Arnedo Casas (Internal Material Research Grant – Barcelona Crea 2026)

Oriol’s practice navigates the shifting and malleable realms of technology and nature. His sculptural compositions interrogate the realities that surround us and explore the capacity of performative objects to generate new imaginaries.

Autonomous artifacts, absurd machines that come to life, technological organisms… A restless, mechanized desire to engage with the environment connects his objects. This embodies the idea of mechanized, rudimentary living matter in the ultra-technological era. The machine, in his work, does not adopt a functional role but an imaginary one in our lives. Within the context of socio-climatic crisis, his work offers a critical perspective on the Western conception of nature and seeks to create new narratives that help redefine our relationship with the environment.

At Paratext, he will present the work developed as part of the 2026 Hangar Production Grant, continuing the research and experimentation project Dismantling the Machine, an ongoing line of inquiry that explores alternative and unconventional uses of technological devices. The presentation will focus on the player piano, a mechanical, self-playing musical instrument that has become central to the project. Popularised in the late nineteenth century, this device is closely tied to the processes of industrialisation and to the technological and mechanical advances that transformed modern society.