"Typus Orbis Terrarum" Installation

At the intersection of her training as an architect and her artistic practice, Paola Monzillo examines the ways in which territory has been represented, measured, and narrated. Cartographies and historical accounts emerge not as neutral records, but as constructions that organize imaginaries, hierarchies, and modes of belonging. As a South American artist and granddaughter of European immigrants, she situates her work within the tensions that shape the identities of her territory—where local voices and dominant narratives overlap, contradict one another, or are silenced. She positions herself within this field of friction, exploring displacements, ruptures, and reinterpretations that reconfigure space as a historical construction. In this sense, inhabiting and narrating appear as inseparable practices, traversed by subjective positions and contested meanings. Through a range of media and techniques, she develops processes based on layering, interweaving, reconstruction, and translation. Her practice incorporates manual procedures that involve time, repetition, and shifts in scale, emphasizing a dimension in which materiality ceases to be a mere support and instead assumes a structuring role within the work.