Catalonia in Venice: Claudia Pagès Rabal

Paper Tears is an immersive installation by Claudia Pagès Rabal that combines light, sound, speech, movement and sculptural elements to activate a fifteenth-century archive of paper watermarks. Laser projections, a sculptural LED screen and an enveloping soundscape reveal and then dismantle this historical material, inviting reflection on how systems of knowledge and authority have been shaped over time.

The cohort appearing in the video activates the watermarks through spoken interventions. The eclectic characters respond to the projected images using intuitive registers rather than institutional rhetoric. As their voices gradually erode the archive’s authority, the watermarks projected onto the walls mutate into unstable, hybrid forms as performers move across historical aquifers and strategic water routes in Catalonia. Humour, singing, dancing and poetry circulate alongside critique, foregrounding non-academic and subcultural modes of expression that resist stabilisation. These gestures unsettle the symbolic violence embedded in the watermarks.

Looping and non-linear, Paper Tears unfolds through multiple points of view, oscillating between individual experience and collective narration, allowing viewers to enter and leave at any moment.