Seila Fernández Arconada
Seila Fernández Arconada is a multidisciplinary artist-researcher developing a process-based practice focusing on exploring artistic methods, its boundaries and new social approaches. She has been implementing this research by working on a number of international artistic experiments exploring concepts such as resilience, fragile environments and migration by addressing socio-environmental concerns connected to climate and social uncertainty on personal and community level.
This praxis involves the use of different media including creative mapping, interventions in the public space, socially engaged practice with methods that draw from ethnographic research, cultural geography, landscape studies, climate change research.
Participatory and collaborative research methods involving academics, practitioners, community members have been central to her practice. She has worked in artistic and transdisciplinary collaborations using bespoke methods for each project. Interests that resonate fully with Reshape project interests and aims.
She is Honorary Research Staff in the Department of Civil Engineering of the University of Bristol (UK) and research collaborator at 'Art, Research and Feminism' at the University of the Basque Country (Spain). She has co-directed The Land of the Summer People, collaboration with the Water Engineering Department at University of Bristol and the project Some:When, celebrating cohesion through the watery heritage of the Somerset Levels and Moors, a collaborative-socially engaged project co-directed with the artist Sage Brice and locals (UK).
She exhibited internationally and delivered numerous cross-disciplinary workshops and interventions, recents include Communities Development in Post-Crisis Regions (Ukraine), Governing for Resilience in Vulnerable Places (Netherlands), Afluents (Spain).