Curatorial text by: Paula Tomasini Collado

In the era of 3D printing, “playing God” becomes commonplace, forming part of the creation of Lola Zoido’s pieces. Despite our ignorance, this tool works on patience: building layer upon layer at its own slow pace, proposing either the humanization of the machine or the mechanization of artisanal work. On this matter, Laura Subirats writes in her essay Returning to the Body Through the Machine:

“Considering that only what is created by hand and at a human pace can be considered artisanal is an anthropocentric view that reinforces the idea of human supremacy over other forms of agency. However, all art can be artisanal if we understand the creative process as a dialogue between multiple forces—the machine, the material, digital information, and time” (Subirats, 2025).

From this perspective, the very concept of craftsmanship expands. The term comes from ars, artis in Latin, meaning art, and by adding the suffix -ia, it refers to a quality or a way of doing. An object that belongs to the realm of craftsmanship thus belongs to the world of art, and its technique is manual. It is not contradictory, therefore, to consider Zoido’s practice as a 21st-century craftsmanship in which the 3D printer integrates as an extension of body and thought, allowing her, as she herself states, to “think with her hands.” [...]

Key pieces to understand this viewpoint are the textiles presented throughout the gallery Marc Bibiloni’s second room. The pieces are printed in sections and assembled using a 3D pen, almost as if sewing them together. The connection is clear: in the end, the 3D printer functions as a type of computer, and the computer as a contemporary loom. Thus, the historical link between the first computing systems and Jacquard’s machine reveals a continuity; its origin lies in the operation of this loom, which used punched cards to indicate which threads should be lifted or lowered, transmitting precise instructions to the machine. Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace were inspired by this invention to create calculating machines, which led to the first computers, also using punched cards, in this case to input data and programs.

All of Zoido’s weavings are displayed like inflated sails, emphasizing the flexibility of the material and the pieces, highlighting their capacity to fold, sometimes cascading to the floor, as in the case of Pequeño ejercicio sobre la carne del mundo (II), and giving corporeality to the matter. The intention to create these folds challenges the dimensionality of the pieces, since we normally perceive textiles in two dimensions.

Precisely, the cavity created within them plays with both known and unknown reality. Following Deleuze’s ideas, matter is a fold. We are made of folds due to the porous and flexible texture of our bodies, which creates caverns within caverns. Our bodily movement is also curvilinear, and there is the inseparability of the parts that the existence of the fold entails. The body is created in itself by the fold, forming embryos, scars, and the brain itself.

Zoido thus creates organic forms from folds and curves. Her pieces in pink tones may literally remind us of internal organs, as if a body were opening before the viewer. A body is made of various types of tissues, of clusters of cells performing specific functions, and the repeating patterns on the surfaces of these pieces aesthetically resemble these formations. Normally, the infill structures of 3D printing remain hidden, but the artist chooses to expose them and make them visible.

In this way, the sculptures become a kind of revelation of the visceral, inviting the viewer to imagine internal bodily parts. Parts that, like the elements inside a computer, each perform a mechanized function. Parts that do not always work perfectly, dialoguing with imperfection, which in Zoido’s pieces materializes through the failure of the material itself and the technical process. Thus, in a culture that demands efficiency, control, and constant productivity, these sculptures introduce the possibility of failure.

The sculptures are based on a curated selection of everyday photographs taken by the artist with her phone, which artificial intelligence then selects and synthesizes. A formal summary that functions as a visual amalgam stored in our mind and retina, very typical of the digital era we inhabit. After all, the accessibility and ubiquity of our files represents a democratization of power structures; citing Derrida, the archive is linked to authority. In the past, the elite decided not only which archives were preserved but also who could access these spaces, since the physicality of archives implied the existence of physical spaces. Today, everyone possesses their own visual archive, within the palm of their hand.

Nevertheless, the visual mixture we possess, again citing Zoido’s theoretical reference, Laura Subirats, functions as a “digital Diogenes.” This effect makes us capture every moment excessively, storing useless data on our hard drives, and losing the capacity for observation and visual selection. In the realm of social networks, this effect translates precisely into an infinite amount of multimedia content and our submission to it through scrolling, a gesture whose repetition and screen brightness foster insomnia, preventing our biological pause that escapes the capitalist logics of hyper-productivity.

Thus, in Os devuelvo lo que miré (I Return What I Looked At) Lola Zoido does not limit herself to highlighting this tension, but she exposes the digital interface, designed to go unnoticed: the more “transparent” it appears, the less conscious we are of the processes, decisions, and materialities that sustain it. Zoido conceives it as a tactile encounter, just as the printed design of her hands in the looms shows, establishing a parallel between the logic of the body and that of computational systems.