Eulalia Valldosera - Plastic Mantra
Italy, 2016
Art, Documentary
What this film tells
Body, water, plastic, memory — Eulalia Valldosera's Plastic Mantra moves through matter as through a living archive, where the sound of waves and the act of breastfeeding become the same gesture.
Why it matters
At a moment when the relationship between human bodies and synthetic materials has become one of the defining crises of our time, Valldosera's Plastic Mantra offers something rare: not an analysis, but a reckoning. The plastic is not metaphor — it is matter, sound, sensation, memory. It reminds us of waves. It reminds us of milk. The film matters because it holds together things we prefer to keep separate: the intimate and the political, the personal and the ecological, the sacred and the toxic. In five minutes, it covers more ground than most documentaries manage in an hour.
What this film tells
Body, water, plastic, memory — Eulalia Valldosera's Plastic Mantra moves through matter as through a living archive, where the sound of waves and the act of breastfeeding become the same gesture.
Why it matters
At a moment when the relationship between human bodies and synthetic materials has become one of the defining crises of our time, Valldosera's Plastic Mantra offers something rare: not an analysis, but a reckoning. The plastic is not metaphor — it is matter, sound, sensation, memory. It reminds us of waves. It reminds us of milk. The film matters because it holds together things we prefer to keep separate: the intimate and the political, the personal and the ecological, the sacred and the toxic. In five minutes, it covers more ground than most documentaries manage in an hour.
Eulalia Valldosera
Eulalia Valldosera (born 1963, Vilafranca del Penedès, Catalonia) is one of the most distinctive and quietly radical artists working at the intersection of performance, installation, and video. Her practice is built on a fundamental conviction: that art is not made, but channelled — that the artist's role is to listen, to open, and to allow the invisible forces of matter, memory, and collective experience to pass through.
Trained in Barcelona and active internationally since the late 1980s, Valldosera developed an early body of work centred on light, shadow, and the domestic space — projections that transformed everyday objects into charged presences, revealing the hidden architectures of intimacy and power. Over time, her practice expanded toward performance and ritual, drawing on the figures of the healer, the medium, and the archetypal artist as intermediary.
Her works engage with memory at multiple scales: personal and ancestral, bodily and geological, local and planetary. Water, fire, organic matter, and synthetic materials recur as elements that carry meaning beyond language — substances that remember, that connect, that wound.
Valldosera has exhibited widely across Europe and Latin America, with major presentations at institutions including the Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid, and the Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona. Her relationship with Studio Trisorio in Naples reflects a deeper affinity with a city — and a cultural milieu — attuned to the energies she works with.
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