“Unveiling the structures of power and control through photography” is the leitmotif of Paula Artés’s work. Starting with a background in photography, her practice has progressively shifted its focus toward the research process, incorporating methodologies from critical and political analysis. In the systems she examines, she identifies mechanisms of power and control that operate from a distance, invisibility, or intangibility.
In various projects he has addressed the opacity of a state body, the Civil Guard, understood as an operational system of police control (Fuerzas y cuerpos [Forces and bodies], 2016-2018); the exploitation of the natural environment and the forms of regulation exercised by large oligopolies (Energía sumergida [Submerged energy], 2018-2024; El caudal del río [The flow of the river], 2021-2025); or the VIP space in a sporting context as a place of agreements with great political and economic impact (Palco de honor [Honorary box], 2025), to mention only a few.
Firma, [Sign,] (2017-2019) is not her most recent work, although the passage of time has added new layers of meaning. Begun as a final year project under the supervision of Tanit Plana and Marta Dahó, Firma, marks a turning point in Artés’s work by giving central weight to research as a constitutive part of the piece. Firma, is structured around a series of direct and profoundly political questions: What does the State know about us? How much personal information does it manage? From where does it exercise control? What use does it make of this data? These questions serve as catalysts to sharpen our position as critical citizens.
The exhibition, titled Firma, focuses on official spaces that collect and manage our data—medical centers, civil registries, funeral homes, libraries, post offices—which the artist photographs using a large-format camera and an analog process. The images depict anonymous, prototypical, and perfectly interchangeable places, devoid of any trace of human presence. The carefully chosen framing evokes dead ends: spaces without exits, corridors without vanishing points, permeated by a Kafkaesque atmosphere. These are images that reflect the bureaucratic aspects of our lives, now indistinguishable from the vital ones.
In parallel, Artés compiles a large number of documents from these same spaces, forms requesting personal information that repeatedly culminate in the same imperative verb: “sign.” Sometimes accompanied by a comma intended to soften the command, other times followed by a colon, but always stated as a mandate. A seemingly banal gesture that condenses the transfer of rights, data, and responsibilities into a single act.
Photographs and documents thus create a portrait of the state’s administrative structure as a contemporary panopticon. Bentham’s prison design (a central tower from which inmates are watched without their knowledge) and its reformulation by Michel Foucault, as a technology of power extendable to the whole of society, acquire new significance in the context of accelerated digitalization, especially since the 2020 pandemic.
The artist’s book(1) that is part of the project includes a revealing conversation between Paula Artés and Gemma Galdón Clavell, PhD in security and technology policy and public policy analyst. It reflects on how the modern state is founded on data management as a form of organization and control, and how bureaucracy plays a key role in its historical constitution.
With digitalization, this capacity for control increases exponentially. The data we voluntarily provide is intertwined with that collected involuntarily, generated by our daily activities, from the purchases we make to the routes we take, the services we use, and the platforms we consult. We are more monitored, but less aware of it, and paradoxically, we have less control over our own data.
The technofeudalism (2) described by Yanis Varoufakis is no longer a theoretical abstraction but a palpable reality. The primary purpose of digital data infrastructures is not to make our lives easier or expand our rights, but rather to maximize the profitability of large global technology corporations.
The spaces photographed by Paula Artés still exist, although their functions have been radically transformed. It is no longer necessary to physically travel to complete a transaction: one or a few clicks are all it takes. Data then ascends to what we call “the cloud,” a poetic and seemingly innocuous term that masks the proliferation of physical data centers, which are highly resource-intensive, especially in terms of water and electricity, with an increasingly evident ecological and geopolitical impact.
The disappearance of physical space does not imply the disappearance of control, but rather its intensification. Power no longer needs monumental architecture or a visible presence; it operates in a distributed, opaque, and automated manner. Bureaucracy, far from diminishing, becomes more efficient, faster, and more difficult to challenge. The act of signing, now transformed into accepting, checking a box, or swiping a finger, occurs more frequently and with less awareness of its consequences. This signature places us before a central paradox of contemporary democracies: the more streamlined administrative systems become, the less room there is for dissent. Consent becomes a formality, and responsibility shifts to the individual, while the infrastructures of power remain outside our field of vision. Invisibility thus becomes a fundamental political strategy. What is not seen is not questioned, and what is not questioned becomes normalized.
In this sense, Paula Artés’s project traces a critical cartography of the present, in which control is not imposed by force, but rather managed through protocols, interfaces, and administrative languages that we have learned to accept as inevitable.
Understanding these mechanisms, making them visible, and naming them is a profoundly political act. It does not guarantee emancipation, but it is an indispensable condition for imagining it. Because only that which is understood can be questioned, and only that which is questioned can, eventually, be transformed.
(1) Artés, Paula, Firma. Cuaderno de la Kursala, nº 90. Universidad de Cádiz, 2025.
(2) In Varoufakis, Yannis’ Technofeudalism: What killed Capitalism (Bodley Head, 2023), the author identifies the owners of what he calls “cloud capital” as new feudal lords, turning us into serfs. The consequence is increased inequality.
[This text accompanies the exhibition Firma, by Paula Artés at the Centre Cultural Melchor Zapata, Benicássim. 19 February – 26 April 2026]
