Elaia Blades (Basque Country)
From experimental cinema, fueled by pop imagery and counterculture, the artist develops a transdisciplinary practice encompassing video art, sound, and lenticular mixed media, the latter being an investigation into movement derived from filmmaking and encapsulated within static images. In her practice, eroticism, and witchcraft are positioned as residual practices within the Eros -Thanatos axis, where desire, death, and belief meet. Fetishes and sexual kinks operate through repetition, symbolic charge, and projection, drawing a parallel with various magical and esoteric systems and their corresponding ritual practices. These forces coexist and feed into one another: sex and death as that which truly makes us feel alive, as edge experiences that enable an aesthetic of paroxysm, revolving around the idea that these are the only subjects capable of truly holding human attention.
Her experience over several years as a tarot reader and astrologer influenced her approach to the image, both thematically and structurally, which, combined with the use of technology, impregnates her entire body of work as both a tool and a means of analysis. Drawing from these influences, the artist questions mechanisms of social control through the aesthetics of post-internet culture and the digital context, also addressing the emergence of new dogmas (especially within the New Age imaginary) that function as forms of indoctrination of the individual under an alternative guise.
Her work has been exhibited at venues such as Centro de Cultura Contemporánea Conde Duque as part of the BMW Digital Art Award 2026, as well as at various galleries during events such as the Venice Biennale and Art Basel Miami, in addition to numerous international film festivals.