Catalonia in Venice: Claudia Pagès Rabal, Paper Tears
Collateral Event of the 61st International Art Exhibition - La Biennale di Venezia

The Institut Ramon Llull presents Catalonia in Venice: Claudia Pagès Rabal, Paper Tears at the 61st International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia. The installation, curated by Elise Lammer, will be open to the public from May 9th to November 22nd at the Docks Cantieri Cucchini in San Pietro di Castello.

Catalonia in Venice: Claudia Pagès Rabal, Paper Tears is an installation by Claudia Pagès Rabal that investigates paper watermarks as symbolic and political devices. Through laser projections, a sculptural LED screen, and an enveloping soundtrack, these watermarks, which were created in the paper manufacturing process and historically linked to origin and authenticity, are revealed and examined. Invites us to reflect on how institutional systems of knowledge and authority have taken shape over time, ultimately colliding with the contemporary world.

The watermarks are projected onto the walls of the Catalonia in Venice space. They are activated by a set of eclectic characters who comment on them, following intuitive registers rather than institutional rhetoric. The initial watermarks connect us with contemporary realities and they mutate into unstable and hybrid forms, while performers move across historical aquifers and strategic water routes in Catalonia.
Catalonia in Venice: Claudia Pagès Rabal, Paper Tears unfolds through multiple points of view, both across the installation as a whole and within each individual voice and sound, oscillating between collective narration and singular experience. Its spatial and conceptual organisation is inspired by the underground and surface networks of fresh and salt water —levels, tides, and flows— that function as the topological framework of the project.

The archive that constitutes the core of the project consists of 15th-century paper watermarks preserved in the archives of the Museu Molí Paperer de Capellades (Catalonia). They reflect the artist's long-standing interest in these marks, which are only visible when backlit. Produced at a time when Mediterranean trade routes were declining and Atlantic trade was expanding, they belong to a pivotal moment in history often associated with the beginnings of modernity, which paved the way to new regimes of circulation and power. Paper disseminated alongside ideas, contracts, and codes that documented authority, ownership, and regulation. Places like Venice and Catalonia occupied key positions within this transformation, the logics of which continue to shape our contemporary condition.

In French, the expression en filigrane refers to something that lies beneath the surface: an idea, an emotion, or a tension that resists direct expression but remains present.
Experiencing Catalonia in Venice: Claudia Pagès Rabal, Paper Tears can be like stepping into a time machine. Not to reconstruct a chapter of history, but because elements emblematic of a specific era confront contemporary realities. In a moment marked by geopolitical conflicts, migration crises, and
states of emergency, Paper Tears reveals a disturbing continuity between the power infrastructures of the past and those of the present.

Claudia Pagès Rabal is a visual artist, performer, and writer based in Barcelona. In her practice, Pagès Rabal intertwines words, bodies, music, and movement, producing visual and linguistic devices such as video installations, works on paper, and books, where points of interest converge drawing from linguistics, psychoanalysis, and decolonial studies. Her work has been exhibited at institutions such as mumok, Vienna (2025); Index, Stockholm (2025); Chisenhale, London (2025); IVAM, Valencia (2024); Sculpture Center, New York (2024); CA2M, Madrid (2023); Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona (2023); Tabakalera, Donostia (2022); Vleeshal, Middelburg (2022); MACBA, Barcelona (2022); Kunstverein Braunschweig, Braunschweig (2021); Sharjah Art Foundation, United Arab Emirates (2018). She participated in the 18th Istanbul Biennial (2025) and Manifesta 15, Barcelona (2024). Her first novel, Més de dues aigües, was published in Catalan by Empúries Narrativa in 2024.... read the rest of the article»