Los otros residentes
1 October 2022

Los otros residentes
Paula Bruna and Silvia Renda

2022 – Artist’s book

46 pages | Size: 9 x 14 cm
8 handmade envelopes with field record cards
Digital printing  |  Metallic spiral binding | Paper: Freelife Vellum, Colorplan rust

The book narrates the soliloquy of a researcher in residence in a huge rural house in Portugal who tries to decipher the non-human world during some encounters with the “others”, the only “residents” of the place. Through stories extracted from a field diary and fragments of records, between the scientific, the speculative and the poetic, the book reconstructs the thread of Paula’s artistic process: she ventures into an impossible classification and, finally, she will end up confronting her own limit.
Parallel to the growth time of a plant, there are encounters and misunderstandings with more than a dozen species (ants, bats, spiders, snakes, mint plants, crickets…). These discoveries end with a final story, called “Pareidolia”, where anthropomorphic roots reveal the bias of the human gaze.

The book is based on Paula Bruna’s 2020 artistic research “The other residents” at Cultivamos Cultura in São Luís, Portugal. It’s part of the research on artistic processes of Radial Radiant collective, in collaboration with Erica Volpini, which salvaged discarded material (stories, notes, audios, videos, and photographs) for a new creation beyond documentation.

Exhibited at:
2023 – Reimaginados, exhibition at Ectopia Lab – Lisbon (PT)
2023 – Ecos , exhibition at the FBAUL gallery in Lisbon (PT)
2022 – Arts Libris, Mercat de Sant Antoni, Barcelona (ES)

Collections:
2024 – MACBA archive, Barcelona (ES)

– Texts and unpublished images by Paula Bruna
– Concept: Silvia Renda and Paula Bruna
– Design: Silvia Renda
– Handmade envelopes: Aurora Muñoz