MAX RES 2024
In residence at Koynē Residency

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Yese Astarloa explores through materiality and assemblage ways to give form to what appears to be intangible and elusive. She establishes material relationships with digitality and creates imaginaries of the future where temporal layers overlap. She is interested in interstices, strangeness, and the hybridization of certain binaries linked to time, space, and fiction.



An installation crafted with SCOBY, Chinese reishi mushrooms, Arduinos, wires, vibration motors, charcoal, structures, hooks, and metal threads forms a Hecriletf: an acronym in Spanish for a hybrid of space-body, pristine ruin, laboratory, future torture space. The piece presents itself as a living, hybrid assemblage that seeks to challenge the separation between dualities such as analog and digital, tangible and intangible. The installation explores aspects of Helsinki’s territory, serving as the starting point for an investigation into biomaterials and electronic devices.



A monstrous body, resulting from seemingly disconnected procedures and materials, emerges as a hybrid that invites us to reflect on the technological landscape we inhabit. When Everything Works I’m Not There questions the classic separation between the intangible digital and the tangible material. Here, code becomes visible through subtle movements that breathe life into organic and inorganic materials.

The installation proposes a relationship between fragmentation and wholeness: seen in isolation, a fragment lacks potential, yet it gains power when integrated into a whole. This assemblage enables each part to acquire meaning through multiplicity.

A thin SCOBY membrane, composed of multiple fragments, represents the 700 km² of Helsinki’s territory at a 1:15,000 scale. This fragmented space, supported by hooks and metal threads, resembles a taut skin, a living structure activated by 30 vibration motors and electronic devices that transmit a language of code and electricity. This language affects the material, transforming it into a hybrid of body-space. The code is further activated by those who enter the space, altering the movement of the pieces.

Hundreds of delicate mushrooms become legs that support an amorphous body that seems to breathe. The metal structure, along with the SCOBY and its sharp ends, creates confusion: are we facing a threat or a fragile creature protecting itself, like a cactus or a porcupine?

A prosthesis is generally considered a device designed to replace a missing part of the body or improve its function. In this ongoing installation, each element that makes up the piece becomes a kind of prosthesis, enabling the union between the parts.



The installation is composed of interconnected pieces in mutual affectation, sharing formal characteristics. The result is a fragmented whole.

When Everything Works I’m Not There draws inspiration from Jane Bennett’s proposal on "vibrant matter," suggesting that all materiality, far from being inert and passive, possesses its own agency. In this sense, materials affect and are affected by each other. In the installation, materials are not mere passive objects; each element, whether digital or analog, affects and is affected by the others. Here, digitality is not just a tool but becomes a material itself, interacting with the physical world.

The boundary between analog and digital dissolves, suggesting that digitality, far from being immaterial and separate, is part of an active assemblage that conditions our way of being, thinking, and feeling within the technological landscape we inhabit. This work proposes a hybrid exchange where digitality, like any other physical material, influences and is influenced in a continuous process of transformation, blurring its boundaries.

Artist statement

My research and body of work delve into the technical-technological landscape we inhabit. I seek for logics of digital media and supports, seemingly intangible and elusive data, to take shape and materiality, thus unfolding in physical space. Conversely, to the point where the digital and the material hybridize in such a way that attempting to differentiate them becomes absurd. I gather information, data, and traces. I carry out archival and analytical work using a process of translation and transposition into different materials and procedures that allow me to construct new forms, laden with memory, layers of temporality, and movement. In materiality, I seek for each work to enter into a scale relationship with our bodies. I delve into the interstices of things, searching for hidden relationships between digitality and seemingly antagonistic physical materials. How can the memory of a space be captured from minimal, lost, or forgotten units? How can body be given to a set of digital data? How to construct future imaginaries based on thinking about strangeness, the perception of time, and the meaning that materialities unfold? In summary, my work is situated on two lines of research. On one hand, as a technopoetic practice, I investigate “individually” around the analog-digital binomial, thinking of it as a hybrid that feeds back into itself. This allows me to explore multiple forms and problematize other binomials such as movement-immobility, real-virtual space, tangible and intangible. On the other hand, collaborative work, linked to territory, the memory of spaces, and the archive. These two modes of investigation converge, contaminate each other. In this sense, my practice amalgamates these drifts, and I find myself imagining spaces of estrangement that I name Hecriletf (Hybrid of Space-Body-Ruin-Immaculate-Laboratory-Space of Future Torture). From the formal aspects of these pieces, I continue to investigate the search for new hybridizations of duos or binomials and temporal relationships between past, present, and future. The paradoxes, apparent absurdities, or contradictions that derive from the methodology used are the result of an operation that seeks to generate doubts and open up to a critical view about our perception and construction of reality.