Paola Estrella

My practice is about intimacy, desire, and becoming. Auto-fiction, magic realism, and story-telling are central to my work which involves self-reflection, collaboration with other creators, and worldbuilding. During my creative process, I combine mixed media, video, and performance, which often results in video installations. My projects have become portals that allow me to imagine and exteriorize different possibilities that relate to multiple ways of existence and of understanding reality, which arise from questioning social and political notions about gender, the body, and how we connect with one another. I am interested in how technologies such as VR and social platforms have impacted the way we understand intimacy with ourselves and how we perceive and think about the human experience.

Paola Estrella is a multimedia artist born in Mexico City and based in London. She has a BA in Graphic Design, studied art direction and mixed media at Central Saint Martins, and is currently pursuing a master's degree in contemporary art at the Royal College of Art, London, UK.

Estrella's work has been shown at White Cube Gallery as part of Tomorrow:London, at Matts Gallery as part of Mattflix and EverythingForever, in London, UK, at the Franz Mayer Museum in Mexico City, Mexico, at Out Sight Gallery in Seoul, Korea, at Zhou Brothers Art Gallery in Chicago, United States, at the Annual Festival of Post-pornography and Feminism, among others.

For RCA2021, Estrella is premiering Journey to the Underworld, a moving image piece about desire, vulnerability, and sexual repression as a consequence of imposed cultural narratives, followed by A Timeless Parallel, a video that was first exhibited in 2020 which shows a voyeuristic tour across a parallel reality that takes place in a residential complex in Mexico City. As part of this project, Estrella is displaying a series of paintings and photographs available at the RCA2021 online store that resulted from the creative process behind the production of the piece. Below these, a link to two collaborative projects can be found. The first one is Diasporas Now, which is a live-streaming platform for multidisciplinary artists from various non-Western backgrounds that use performance as radical acts of self-representation, and the second one is Matrilineal Mythologies which is an embodied conversation between four artists that explore rituals and entangled stories within intimate gestures.