Firma,<\/em> [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 Dah\u00f3, Firma,<\/em> marks a turning point in Art\u00e9s’s work by giving central weight to research as a constitutive part of the piece. Firma,<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n The exhibition, titled Firma,<\/em> focuses on official spaces that collect and manage our data\u2014medical centers, civil registries, funeral homes, libraries, post offices\u2014which 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.<\/p>\n In parallel, Art\u00e9s compiles a large number of documents from these same spaces, forms requesting personal information that repeatedly culminate in the same imperative verb: \u201csign.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n The artist’s book(1) that is part of the project includes a revealing conversation between Paula Art\u00e9s and Gemma Gald\u00f3n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n The spaces photographed by Paula Art\u00e9s 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 \u201cthe cloud,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n In this sense, Paula Art\u00e9s’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 \u200b\u200bthat we have learned to accept as inevitable.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n(1) Art\u00e9s, Paula, Firma<\/em>. Cuaderno de la Kursala, n\u00ba 90. Universidad de C\u00e1diz, 2025.
\n(2) In Varoufakis, Yannis’ Technofeudalism: What killed Capitalism<\/em> (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.<\/h6>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/montsebadia.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/6984627d99585-300x240.jpg\")