Digital projections

For this edition of the Riu d’art Street Fest, we added a series of digital projections. We used the backdrop of the beautiful sandstone castle wall in Plaça del Forn. Artwork was chosen from an application process which took place during the pandemic. Selected artists were; E Serkan Sokmen from Turkey, James Aldridge from the UK, Romina Cristi from Chile and Sarah Misselbrook based in Catalunya.

Artists responded to the theme ‘Water/River’ and sent their proposals to Riba Rocks for consideration. The four selected works showed such diversity in content and concept.

James Aldridge

I am a Wiltshire (UK) based visual artist working with people and places. I research different places through walking/cycling, collecting and recording, and I reflect on/share these experiences through making.

I work with a variety of media, choosing those of relevance to the place/subject matter, from ‘natural’ and recycled materials, gathered locally, to photographs, text and video. The resulting artwork may take the form of small hand-held objects, wearable artwork, freestanding sculpture or large site-specific installations.

This individual side of my practice is interwoven with participatory elements, writing and mentoring. The individual and the participatory each feed into and inform the other, generating a body of practice-led research into the value of artful, embodied and situated (place-based) practices.

Sarah Misselbrook

Misselbrook, was born in the United Kingdom in 1977. The artist graduated with honours in Fine Arts in 2000, Nottingham Trent University (UK) and it is from then on, when she begins her multimedia practice. In 2007, she studied for a postgraduate degree in Fine Arts at the Cyprus College of Art, Paphos. In 2011, she studied a Master of Fine Arts at the Winchester School of Art (UK). Since 2012, Misselbrook has lived in the Riba-roja d’Ebre countryside, which serves as her connection and is her source of inspiration for her works.
Her practice includes ‘performance’, video recordings with her voice in isolation and ‘site-specific’ sculptural installations. She addresses various topics such as gender, feminism, the female body as a canvas, and consumption. In this sense, she focuses on the individual responsibility of consumption and its environmental consequences. To do this, she uses degradable or edible materials such as chocolate, soap, latex, soil or wax.

The juxtaposition of hard against soft, light against dark, and sensual against skeleton are elements of Misselbrook’s visual language. In short, an internal struggle in a body that is all-consuming. Recently, she has been invited to create an installation and a performance in the Maials forest, which was
devastated by a forest fire in June 2019. The work is part of the ‘Cendrart’ project. Her works are the result of the total immersion in the rural environment and the constant research on the balance between life and death, transience and fragility.

E Serkan Sokmen

I was born in 1980 in Ankara, Turkey. I was introduced to traditional drawing through comics and BASIC programming through Commodore64 at an early age and developed a passion for both fields. I began my university education at Hacettepe University’s Department of Economics in 1999. While studying at the university, I did both personal and commercial studies in web programming, 3D animation, and modeling.In 2004, I pursued my interest in art and left the Department of Economics to study sculpture at Hacettepe University’s Faculty of Fine Arts. In 2008, I graduated with the highest degree and worked as a Research Assistant in the same department. My master’s thesis was on the applications of human-machine interaction, algorithms, and image-processing technologies in performance arts. I participated in numerous national and international symposia, workshops, and art festivals as an instructor.My individual and academic works were displayed in numerous personal and group exhibitions. Since 2010, I continue my career as a software architect in start-ups in Turkey and abroad. My current interests include game development, open-source technologies, creative coding, machine learning, artificial intelligence, and augmented reality.

Romina Cristi

I’m a Chilean artist living in Santiago, just next to the Andes Mountain Range. I paint landscapes and subjective maps in watercolour and create zines and artist books. 

My work is the trace of the habits and rituals I build in order to define my reality and it focuses on the perception I have of the place that surrounds me and the one inside me.

I create artworks that are mostly small, even miniature. Mainly in series. These are the witnesses of the actions I obsessively repeat to integrate that which intrigues me. This is also a reminder to myself (and you) that beauty resides in the tiny details of life that, sometimes, we take for granted.

My education is in architecture and I’m deeply curious about the subjective dimension of human dwelling. That’s why you might relate my work to concepts such as Urban Imaginaries, Psychogeography and Walking. For the last eight years my life used to be quite nomadic, that’s why questions like how I am connected with a territory, how it influences me and how I adapt when moving, are the fuel for my art, especially now that I’m back to my home land.