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Regina de Miguel

Life in Conamara, 2025

Installation view: Art Sonje, Photo: TBA21

Regina de Miguel

Commissions & Productions

Regina de Miguel

Life in Conamara, 2025

Mural and eight 3-D printed objects

366 x 928 x 11 cm
Commissioned and produced by TBA21 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary on the occasion of the exhibition Clear, Lucid and Awake at Art Sonje Center, Seoul, Korea

Regina de Miguel’s newly commissioned work Life in Conamara comprises a mural and a series of eight 3D-printed objects. In recent years, de Miguel's practice has been deeply engaged with extractivist violence and geotrauma, focusing on war-scarred landscapes such as the Colombian jungle (Catábasis) and the mining basin of Rio Tinto in Spain (Nekya, a river film).

In Life in Conamara, the artist turns her attention to Europa, one of Jupiter’s moons, constructing a speculative and synthesized cartography of its geology. Europa’s smooth and icy surface has long intrigued scientists, particularly for the hypothesis that an ocean lies beneath it—an ocean that could potentially harbor life. On September 21, 2023, NASA, ESA, and CSA jointly announced that the James Webb Space Telescope had detected carbon dioxide on Europa’s surface, likely sourced from this subsurface ocean and accumulated in geologically recent times. This discovery suggests that Europa may indeed have conditions suitable for life.

De Miguel’s mural charts this speculative terrain, while the accompanying 3D-printed sculptures—resembling mineral forms—are fabricated using statistical data sourced from Eurostat (the European Statistical Office). These sculptures reflect a somatology of cognitive capitalism, with some referencing materials linked to contemporary technological use. By mapping speculative life on Europa alongside data extracted from European economic and social systems, Life in Conamara invites reflection on the entanglements between planetary geologies, extractive systems, and the epistemologies of science and power.

RELATED PROGRAM

Regina de Miguel
Nekya. Una película río | Nekya. A film river, 2022

Clear, Lucid, and Awake - Spanish Artists from the TBA21 Collection Exhibition at Art Sonje Center, Seoul

Clear, Lucid, and Awake | Public Program Art Sonje Centre, Seoul

Artists

Regina de Miguel