The unique dialogue between science and art promoted by CREAF with the Ecotons initiative has a privileged perspective since the 2025 edition, since Paula Bruna is the curator. This is because, apart from her labels, Bruna is both an artist with a degree in environmental sciences who devoted herself to research 20 years ago, and a scientist who put aside her research career and then territorial management to train in Fine Arts and specialise in conceiving art installations. And the latter is her current role. “I was headed towards the scientific career because I like to know, to study, to ask myself questions”, she says. “At that time I was lucky to work with the group of CREAF researcher Josep Peñuelas”. This memory goes back quite a few years and, just as she admits to having enjoyed and learned a lot, she also confesses that she experienced some disappointment which she can now put into words. "Some parts of the research were too narrow and limited me", while admitting that “I was probably too young”.
Creativity, the ability to change routes according to the results and rigour are some of the connections between apparently distant disciplines: the scientific, based on evidence, and the artistic, established on subjectivity. “There are many ways of understanding the confluence between science and art”, says Paula Bruna. “I come from the question that both science and art pose about what the world is like and how we can understand it. Science and art have a lot in common: an initial question and a hypothesis, a search from practice through which we look for answers, although often more questions are generated...”. It is at this meeting point that the current edition of Ecotons, which Bruna is curating, aims to “promote a limited and precise link between an artistic proposal and a CREAF research project”. The underlying intention has a scientific basis, as she puts it: "to continue to encourage questions to stir emotion".
Stirring up emotion
Emotion is precisely the signal, the great sign, as Bruna refers to it. And it might be is also a symptom of our lack of action as a society in the face of climate change and the loss of biodiversity, which this scientist-artist links to art. “As an environmentalist, I am very disappointed that so many indicators that require our intervention, such as species loss and CO2 emissions, are worsening. This is where art has meaning and utility. We have more and more precise indicators, but we lack the emotion to change how we see the world. And this is very evident in politics". Bruna also insists that “we believe the fiction that we are a superior species, and we don't question it”.
As an environmentalist it is disappointing that so many environmental indicators that require our intervention, such as species loss and CO2 emissions, are worsening. This is where art has meaning and utility. We have a lot of data, increasingly accurate, but we lack the emotion to change the way we see the world. And this is very evident from politics.
Her contribution to change this paradigm is to keep pushing questions through science, fiction and artistic practice: “it helps me to enter non-human points of view. And how can I do that? Through art and fiction: a scientific basis helps me to understand who other beings are and how they perceive other beings and how living a practice or now as transgressing artistic boundary allows me to turn this fiction into an experience for a certain time. For me it has a valuable transformative potential”.
The aim of her artistic residency at CREAF Ecotons, however, is to rethink ourselves: “to reach the research staff, I see an open door to offer an escape route towards everything that the scientific method rejects for the sake of objectivity". Therefore, "Ecotons is conceived in two ways, between two habitats: also to open art to science, the possibility of channeling the emotional and intuitive, creative side in many ways, which can have an impact on scientific work."
The Fine Arts as a filter of the world
The artistic impulse remained latent while she was part of the first team of specialists in environmental sciences of the Catalan autonomous government dedicated to research and innovation within territorial assessment, an experience as exciting as it was absorbing. “I really liked the cross-cutting vision: devising spatial planning for people, considering ecological connectivity, mobility, land ownership, etc”. But, at the same time, it was an exhausting experience that led her to focus on art, her original and most genuine interest. “I enrolled at the University of Barcelona and I remember being the happiest person in the world on the first day of class with my paintbrushes in my hand”, she recalls.
A 6-month fellowship at the prestigious The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New York and another at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Athens consolidated a confidence and a path. “For the first time I thought I could be serious. In New York I exhibited for the first time, the field of work opened up, I experimented in two dimensions, I had the resources and the permission to investigate and do and I expanded. That's when I started working with video: I felt very free, and I dared to”.
What sounds like a liberation is the embryo of an artistic career that has always been more linked to a dialogue with science, a reality that he explains by referring to her way of being on Earth. “The fact that I like fine art has to do with how I live life and see the world. In Athens I started a conscious environmental policy project linked to degrowth with an artistic viewpoint”, she mentions, while recalling she was not yet fully aware she was facilitating a dialogue between science and art. “I knew artists who used scientific techniques in an aesthetic way, although I didn't find the use of science with aesthetic criteria attractive. I had no reference from the search for this combination of knowledge”, she recalls.
