Paula Proaño Mesías

  1. A Thousand Eyes Beneath the Tide
  2. The Llama That Kindles the Wetland
  3. Pulverizing the World, but Also Spiritualizing Its Dust
  4. May the Illusion Be Nourished by the Whisper of the Wind, Not by the Sedative Modern Spell
  5. On Trans-Spirit, Technobodies and the Family of Tukã
  6. Chimeras
  7. Hyperbeccus (On Transhuman Artifacts)
  8. Grecia (On Repair Mechanisms)
  9. Elizabeth (On Surgical Musical Instruments)
  10. Tukã (On Domestication Devices)
  11. Íyi (On Mystical and Sacred Objects)
  12. Translucent Matter
  13. Studies on Zoo-Physiologic Modification: Grecia
  14. Untitled
  15. Sustenance

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©2025 Paula Proaño Mesías

P001 → A Thousand Eyes Beneath the Tide 


https://www.saf2025.org/en/exhibition/a-thousand-eyes-beneath-the-tide

‘A Thousand Eyes Beneath the Tide’ is a participatory project that reimagines the familiar language of children’s beach toys—buckets, shovels, and sand molds—, early instruments for shaping spatial control and constructing a worldview. Through this lens, the project examines how play serves as a rehearsal for our deeply entangled relationships with the environment, cohabitation, and multi-species world-making. 
    By activating sculptural objects on the beach, ‘A Thousand Eyes Beneath the Tide’ proposes new ways of embodying an expanded notion of the human-animal. These playful tools function as speculative interfaces, inviting us to question how bodily gestures, instinct, and imagination might reconfigure our sense of kinship and agency. The project challenges us to unlearn extractive habits and experiment with more porous  modes of inhabiting the world. 
    Twelve sculptural objects, installed directly on Dadaepo beach, preserve traces of their original forms while simultaneously resisting conventional utility. Through gestures of slowness, misuse, care, and improvisation, participants are invited to engage in a counter-narrative to extractive play, opening up space for reparative relations: for play as listening, for holding without grasping, and for being shaped by the environment rather than dominating it. 
    ‘A Thousand Eyes Beneath the Tide’ is an invitation to dwell in impermanence, to sense how a place shapes our movement, and to learn from the undoing as much as from the doing. Here, play evolves into attunement—an experiment in listening to forces beyond our control and in co-composing meaning with the more-than-human world.


Installation view of ‘A Thousand Eyes Beneath the Tide’, Sea Art Festival, Undercurrents: Waves Walking on the Water, Busan Biennale, 2025.  

Installation, 12 pieces 3D printed with PLASTK filament made from recycled bottles, dimensions variable, 2025.
Performance, 15’. Performers: Seung-hwan Jung & Nawon Jung

https://vimeo.com/1123997696
Pw: busan









Under the title ‘Undercurrents: Waves Walking on the Water’, the exhibition traces the subtle metabolic exchanges hidden between land and sea, seeking to reveal their invisible yet vital flows as part of our sensory and embodied experience. This edition of Sea Art Festival asks how the shifting metabolic rhythms of the sea intersect with our daily lives, and how these unseen processes might surface as shared awareness.


Commissioned by the Busan Biennale Organizing Committee, 2025.

ⒸBusan Biennale Organizing Committee. All rights reserved. (Photo: Changsu Yoon)