Karla Tobar Abarca

Karla Tobar Abarca (b. 1981,Quito-Ecuador) lives and works in Bilbao-Spain. Artist and Researcher, Ph.D. candidate at the University of the Basque Country, she has published scientific articles and given lectures at international conferences in Spain and Germany.

Her artwork has been exhibited in Museums and Art Centers of Spain and Ecuador: Centro Cultural Montehermoso (2015), Centro Cultural Noáin (2015), International Festival of Experimental Art Música Ex Machina, MEM (2014), Camilo Egas Museum (2007), Centro Cultural Metropolitano (2004).
She was awarded the Basque Artist Program grant by the Solomon Guggenheim Foundation and the Guggenheim Bilbao Museum (2015) and was recently awarded with a production grant from the BilbaoArte Foundation, Bilbao, Spain.

<scanner-pack> is a piece of luggage that contains a desktop scanner designed to scan and record images that result from any kind of pressure exerted on it. The friction, movement and natural light propose an anthropological encounter between the machine, the performer´s body and the places they visit.

This project addresses privacy through the desire of engaging in an intimate relationship with a public space. A public space is an area where individuals can come together and discuss freely, and privacy, as the possibility of any individual or group to express themselves selectively.

<scanner-pack> is based on the logics of Proxemics (Edward T. Hall) when understanding the way we perceive distance as culturally conditioned in each person or as an invisible boundary that marks a personal space that if violated causes distress. With these ideas in mind, <scanner-pack> shortens the normal distance of the private space with a further public area and registers this physical and spatial invasion as an act of personal and interpersonal dynamics between the human body and its surroundings. <scanner-pack> believes that the terms of exposure of a human body through an obsolete technological device within the public space should be inverted and exposed to the environment as an act of rebellion against control mechanisms and imposed images of a place.

This work also relates to the maker movement’s desire to promote independent inventors, and counter the passive attitude of simply consuming generic mass produced merchandise, by empowering people and allowing them to develop their own ways of approaching technology and art in a heavily mediated society.

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Karla Tobar Abarca

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STUBBORN OBJECTS: Counter-Surveillance in a Post-Human Landscape

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