Pep Vidal. Palíndrom. D’una cabana per acabar la tesi a una tesi per acabar la cabana. Curated by Chatgpt

In 2014, Pep Vidal (Rubí, 1980) built a wooden cabin out of leftover art transport crates and settled there for half a year to finish writing his PhD thesis in physics. That project, A Cabin to Finish the Thesis, explored concentration, time, and the relationship between scientific thought and physical action.

In 2025, the Centre d’Art La Panera invites Vidal to present a mid-career retrospective. The artist responds by closing the circle: if in 2014 the cabin served to finish the thesis, now it is the thesis —turned into an artist’s book and catalogue— that serves to finish the cabin.

This new structure is built from all the materials in his studio: wood, tools, drawings, previously exhibited pieces, fragments of unfinished projects, and remnants of processes. By gathering them all into a single body, the artist unifies the materials and erases any hierarchy between what is artwork and what is not.

An Olivetti typewriter and a long typed roll record the real dialogue between Vidal and the artificial intelligence ChatGPT, curator of the exhibition. The text, transformed into physical presence, turns the digital into matter and makes the working process visible.

On one of the walls, nearly a thousand images show the objects that make up the cabin/studio, while a series of drawings expand its form as an extension of its architecture.

The exhibition also presents Vidal’s two theses: the 2014 physics thesis and the current one, printed in LaTeX like an ObraMat or IKEA catalogue. Together they form a single body, where art and science, measurement and error, process and result fold into a temporal palindrome.