IED Barcelona Best Thesis Award 2025 - Visual Arts
Sutura: A Collective Unconscious
IED Barcelona – Student: Carmina Goran
Academic year
2024/2025
‘Sutura’ proposes a speculative mapping of the unconscious. The aim is to explore how intangible experiences can be externalised and spatialised using contemporary tools. The project challenges the boundaries between science and myth, body and territory, self and machine.
By way of a multimedia installation, the student explores the intersection between neuroscience, folklore, and identity. Using EEG technology, she translates the user’s brainwave activity in real time into mythological images generated from dynamic patterns linked to Romanian symbolism, thus reflecting inner turmoil, calm, or fragmentation.
A life-size human form, part body and part vessel, lies at the centre of the installation, which receives changing projections based on the participant’s state of mind. These images surround and imprint the figure, symbolising internal scars and demonstrating how identity is constantly shaped by external influences.
The project also includes an aluminum structure that contrasts the organic nature of folklore with a cold, industrial material, serving as a metaphor for dissociation, resistance, and the rejection of tradition. In parallel, a memory expands the central story of ‘Sutura’ across three narrative levels: personal experience, symbolic interpretation, and field research; with a cover crafted from the same metal, creating a tangible dialogue between material, memory, and meaning.
By fusing technological interpretation with ancestral motifs, the installation becomes a map of mental collapse and reconstruction: a personal myth represented through the logic of the machine, emotional feedback, and fractured cultural heritage.
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