Builders of worlds very similar to ours

Espai 13

Exhibition program
how from here
Artist
Ludovica Carbotta
Dates
Place
Espai 13
Curated by
Carolina Jiménez

This exhibition offers a critical yet playful perspective on the city as a contested space, shaped by social consensus, everyday architecture and waste that as a whole narrate parallel stories. It similarly champions self-construction as a means of reclaiming the right to decide how we use the space and the time that we inhabit.

Carbotta constructs a landscape of formwork, reused materials and altered scales in which recognisable elements in the urban space are transformed to take on different meanings depending on the viewer's perspective. Space is thereby presented as an environment in constant reconstruction, ambivalent and in permanent negotiation, revealing to us how strange the urban spaces we assume as normal are and how imaginary the rules that govern them can be.

Faced with an increasingly controlled, clean city that expels that which is annoying, Carbotta proposes spaces for play as tools with which to question and change the norms. Who decides? Who creates? Who can use art? Her work uses the museum as a starting point from which to intervene in public spaces and imagine other uses, other cities, other futures.

Ludovica Carbotta (Turin, 1982) lives and works in Barcelona. In her practice, she researches the urban space and the way individuals connect with their environment. Through installations, texts and performances, she reflects on concepts such as 'place', 'identity' and 'participation'. Currently, she is developing a concept termed 'fictional site specificity', reinterpreting real places in fictional contexts and emphasising the imagination as key to the construction of knowledge.

In 2019, she participated in May You Live in Interesting Times, the 58th Venice Biennale. In addition, her work has recently been shown in solo exhibitions at the MAMbo (Bologna), the European Pavilion of the OGR (Turin), the Sala Verónicas (Murcia) and the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo (Turin). In addition, she has shown her work in spaces such as Bombon Projects (Barcelona), the Bündner Kunstmuseum (Chur, Switzerland), Marselleria (New York), the Galería Marta Cervera (Madrid) and Careof (Milan). Over the course of her career, she has been awarded a number of prizes and other accolades. She is also the cofounder of the Progetto Diogene programme of residences and of The Institute of Things to Come research centre.

Curatorial text

Online tickets

Ludovica Carbotta, Plenum, 2015. Courtesy of the artist

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Opening on 10th July 2025

Exhibition press release

In collaboration with:

  • Fundació Banc Sabadell