The Ramon Llull Institute presents Catalonia in Venice: Claudia Pagès Rabal, Paper Tears to the 61st International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia. The installation, curated by Elise Lammercan be visited from May 9 to November 22 at the Docks Cantieri Cucchini in San Pietro di Castello. The inauguration will take place on May 7, at 6:00 p.m., and will be attended by the Minister of Culture, Sonia Hernandezand the director of the Ramon Llull Institute, Anna Guitart.
Paper Tears is an installation by Claudia Pagès Rabal that articulates an investigation into paper watermarks as symbolic and political devices. Through laser projections, a sculptural LED screen and an enveloping soundtrack, these watermarks created in the papermaking process and historically linked to provenance and authenticity are revealed and examined. Paper Tears invites us to reflect on how the institutional systems of knowledge and authority have been shaped over time, until they collide with today’s world.
The watermarks are projected onto the walls of the Catalonia in Venice space and are activated by a set of heterogeneous characters who comment on them, following intuitive registers rather than institutional rhetoric. The initial watermarks connect us with contemporaneity and mutate into unstable and hybrid forms, while the performers move through historical aquifers and strategic water routes in Catalonia.
Paper Tears it unfolds through multiple points of view, both in the installation as a whole and in the individuality of each voice and sound, oscillating between the collective narrative and the singular experience. Its spatial and conceptual organization is inspired by the underground and surface networks of fresh and salt water—levels, tides and flows—that function as the project’s topological framework.
The archive that forms the core of the exhibition is made up of fifteenth-century paper watermarks preserved in the archive of Capellades Paper Mill Museumand reflects the artist’s sustained interest in these marks only visible in backlight. Produced at a time when Mediterranean trade routes were declining and Atlantic trade was expanding, they belong to a historical turn often associated with early modernity, which gave rise to new regimes of circulation and power. Paper circulated alongside ideas, contracts and codes that recorded authority, ownership and regulation. Places such as Venice and Catalonia occupied key positions within this transformation, the logic of which continues to shape our contemporary condition.
In French, the expression in watermark it refers to something beneath the surface—an idea, emotion, or tension that resists direct expression but remains present. to experiment Paper Tears it can be like stepping into a time machine. But not to reconstruct a historical chapter, but because representative elements of a certain time are confronted with contemporary states. At a time marked by geopolitical conflicts, migration crises and states of emergency, it reveals a disturbing continuity between the power infrastructures of the past and those of the present.
Claudia Pagès Rabal is a visual artist, performer and writer based in Barcelona. In his practice, Pagès Rabal intertwines words, bodies, music and movement, producing visual and linguistic devices such as video installations, works on paper or books, where points of interest that draw from linguistics, psychoanalysis and decolonial studies converge. His work has been exhibited in institutions such as mumok, Vienna (2025); Index, Stockholm (2025); Chisenhale, London (2025); IVAM, Valencia (2024); Sculpture Center, New York (2024); CA2M, Madrid (2023); Joan Miró Foundation, Barcelona (2023); Tabakalera, Donostia (2022); Vleeshal, Middelburg (2022); MACBA, Barcelona, (2022); Kunstverein Braunschweig, Braunschweig (2021); Sharjah Art Foundation, United Arab Emirates (2018). He has participated in the 18th Istanbul Biennial (2025) and Manifesta 15, Barcelona (2024). His first novel, More than two waterswas published in Catalan by Empúries Narrativa in 2024.
Elise Lammer (b. Lausanne, Switzerland) is the director of Halle Nord, in Geneva. His practice focuses on the role of space, both public and domestic, and on the construction and expression of identity. Transdisciplinary in nature, his work takes a transgenerational and intersectional approach to questioning and reevaluating narratives that have suffered a monolithic and one-sided integration into history, while examining these issues from a contemporary perspective. As an author, researcher and curator, she has contributed to numerous international projects, such as the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum (Lisbon); mumok – Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig (Vienna); MACRO (Rome); Schinkel Pavilion (Berlin); Center culturel suisse (Paris); MAMCO (Geneva); Kunsthaus Glarus (Glarus); Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts (Lausanne); Istituto Svizzero di Roma (Rome), among others.
Ramon Llull Institute
As a public institution dedicated to the international promotion of the Catalan language and culture, the Ramon Llull Institute produces and organizes the participation of Catalonia and the Balearic Islands in the Collateral Event of the Venice Biennale. It has been present at the Art Biennale since 2009 and the Architecture Biennale since 2012. The project presented by the Ramon Llull Institute at the Biennale is chosen by a committee of experts that changes every year.
