PAOLA MONZILLO UY
Paola Monzillo (b. 1986) studies architecture and simultaneously attends different workshops and artist clinics. She began to exhibit on the local circuit in 2009. Paola has shown at such places as MNAV (Uruguay), MAMM (Colombia), MAC (Peru), MACAAL (Morocco) and the National Museum of Saudi Arabia. She has participated in the Montevideo Biennial, the Mercosur Biennial, and in BIENALSUR. In 2014, Paola won the second MEC Acquisition Prize in the 56th José Gamarra National Visual Arts Award and the following year won second place in the French Embassy’s Paul Cézanne Award. She received the FEFCA Justino Zavala Muniz scholarship in 2016 and, in 2018, the Eduardo Víctor Haedo scholarship. Paola lives and works in Montevideo.
Tapestry, traces in the territory II
The piece consists of a set of maps of Spanish-American cities cut into strips and woven together to form a tapestry. The woven design superimposes patterns inspired by pre-Columbian textile iconography and the urban diagram used by the Spanish for the founding of the first cities in America during colonization. As the weaving unfolds, the repetitive sequence of design patterns gradually distorts, intertwining into a glitch-like disfigured surface. Despite the fact that the civilizational project of the conquest had the task of displacing and subjugating all pre existing cultural and identity expressions, its systematic attempts did not manage to make this territory a clean slate. The past and the present confront each other in a political debate that has its roots in the very substratum of the territory and in the modern paradigm of development and progress.