SILVIA FERNÁNDEZ PALOMAR

Silvia Fernández Palomar is an artist and designer from Madrid. In 2019, she won the Spanish National Design Award for her multidisciplinary works in art and design. Holding a degree in fine arts from the Complutense University of Madrid, she studied in Belgium at the ESA Saint Luc, school of architecture and design. She has conducted her professional activity at strategic design consultancies and agencies, such as Ogilvy&Mather and Designit.

Silvia has exhibited at the Museo de las Artes Decorativas, and has collaborated with Madrid Town Hall, designing and conceptualizing the city of Madrid’s official typography. She also received a scholarship to work in Rome from the Royal Academy of Spain in the design category. She currently works on art and design projects, balancing this with her work as educator at the IED European Institute of Design.

For her 4-week residency at Boisbuchet, Silvia began Phase 2 of her project, DO-MAI-NE, a project which aims to break the rigidity of classical objects that have been created over the years to learn or to play and have a very narrow and single way of being used. Coloring out of the line? Bad. Distorted writing? Bad. Wrong piece of the puzzle? Bad. Skipping a page of the book? Bad. 

With the same objective in mind Silvia wanted to explore new ways of facing rigidness during the second phase at Boisbuchet. What if instead of taking properties away she could multiply possibilities of use?

How might we break the rigidity and the single correct use of objects? 

Phase 1: By taking properties away (Rome)

Phase 2: By multiplying the properties (Boisbuchet)

The place influenced the progression of the project. Silvia felt inspired by the collection and the exhibition displayed at the time. With pieces such as the Eames ‘House of Cards’ and ‘The Toy’; Silvia was also inspired by the most tangible part of the Domaine: its buildings. 

As a result, Silvia was able to make a collection of wooden stackable pieces;  a set of shapes based on the 15 most representative buildings of the Domaine that together create a toy or sculpture that encodes the space; a project to interact with, with multiple variations and associations, with no rules of how to be played or used.