© Macarena Vilches

MACARENA VILCHES PARDO

OVNi Residency on SPACE, supported by the Cercle des Amis d’OVNi

Macarena Vilches is a video artist and scenographer based in Nice. Born in Chile, she holds a DNSEP from the Pavillon Bosio School of Art and Scenography in Monaco. Her practice weaves together video and stop-motion animation, with a particular focus on live performance, where she creates intimate dialogue between image and movement, often in collaboration with dance and theatre.

By capturing the evanescence of everyday life — places passed through, moments briefly shared — her work invites the viewer to sense the emotion and meaning nestled within simple, fleeting things. Punctuated by quiet detail, her pieces are coloured by the way imagination subtly shapes our perception of reality, like a gentle mute placed over the world.

A film project exploring the correlations and particularities of bodily movement — functioning at once as a mark of identity and as performative gestus. The dynamics of the body carry history and memory, and betray social function.

@MACARENA VILCHES PARDO

Macarena Vilches Pardo - Statement of Intent

What happens when we spend long stretches of time confined to a small space — a hotel room, for instance?

This installation grows out of a personal experience of confinement and isolation, and the ambivalent relationship I have with enclosed spaces, particularly hotel rooms — places I see as simultaneously transient, sheltering, and imprisoning.

From this experience, the work explores how body and mind are transformed when kept within the same space for an extended period, oscillating between inward withdrawal, exhaustion, and a constant projection toward the outside world.

The installation unfolds within a room at the Hôtel Windsor, transformed through video mapping, animation, sound, and scenographic elements. Together, these devices construct different states of presence within the space and gradually animate a figure — a character who comes to inhabit the room.

The space thus becomes a sensitive, shifting environment in which the interior of the room mirrors a mental state that fluctuates between enclosure and opening.

The viewer is invited to enter this space and experience a fragmented narrative, one in which the intimate and the psychological unfold through image, sound, and the occupation of place.