I am Paula Urbano born 1980 in Stockholm. I live and work in Stockholm and Buenos Aires.
My parents came to Sweden as political refugees from Chile in the 70ies and I am born and raised in Stockholm.
I took my MFA from Konstfack the University of Arts, Crafts and Design in Stockholm in 2008. During my studies there I did two periods abroad, one semester in Universidad Arcis in Santiago de Chile and one in the audiovisual department in Kask the Royal University of Fine Arts in Ghent, Belgium.
The fact that I’ve been brought up in two cultures and speaking two languages simultaneously has created in me the sensation of not belonging to any of them, a permanent feeling that has turned into the orbit of my artistic investigation. I examine the gap between my self-concept and the way I’m regarded by others. I am interested on how language constructs gender and cultural identity. I am bilingual and raised in a bicultural context and have therefore grown up with access to the different worlds. I can see the respective structures and reflect on how I regard myself and how I am looked upon in the different contexts. These observations are something I expose in my artistic practice.
I use fictive elements mixed with true or documental as a strategy to tell a story that shows how biographies and life stories both are a consequence of the socio-political and of coincidence.
I question terms as “race”, gender, sexuality and class by displacing the components.
Exile is a recurrent theme in my works since me and my family’s life story is a consequence of my parent’s exile.
I am interested on how the second generation of migrants, in different parts of the western world, develop a sensibility for psychiatric disorders. I use my personal experience on the matter but also other person’s ditto to explore this issues.
Most often there is a story being told in my work, it can start from the family history ( or the lack of it) as in Her Story (2009-ongoing) or from memories as in Her Life (2008) and how these elements forms the identity.
Other times I tell stories that are less explicit as in Constructing Perpetuality (2007) where I make Romantic landscape photography but add a political message. In these series I work in between the sublime and the political.
I see myself as a storyteller, the result of the work I present is always a story about life.
I want to speak a universal language so that anyone can feel spoken to, regardless of gender, class, ethnicity, cultural context or class to disintegrate the barriers in between the categories. Revolution on a micro-level is what I want to convey with my work. At least you’ll see a wish for change.