Ruth Barranco Raimundo
Between September 16 and 27, 2020, a new edition of the Asalto International Festival of urban
art was held in the city of Zaragoza and against all odds.
This multidisciplinary call that was marked by the global pandemic of COVID-19, focused on
the popular Barrio de San José the interventions of its invited artists and was used by the digital
artist Karto Gimeno (1964, Zaragoza) to experiment in his artistic creation, with the city limits.
Starting from his photographic universes, fed from surrealist painting, cinematographic
narrative, Media Arts and folk tales, this creator here merged his stages of experimentation in
the interior space, with the opening of immersive thresholds in exterior spaces and urban
ensembles. Through interventions on the architectural skin, created with high resolution digital
impressions applied to facades, he opened eventual interdimensional windows that for the
passerby meant a personal narrative to be completed. In these events, psychological outdoor
spaces were shown, which emerged like a wormhole, connecting the city with free nature and
ruin as a trace of memory, proposing to the observer an immersion in their own and collective
unconscious.
His creation, moreover, full of liminal spaces, is full of suggestions and secret corners that flirt
with common immersive images in our individual psyche – umheimlich spaces, hijacking the
Freudian definition – and the intense relationship between place and person, studied by the
philosopher. German Martin Heidegger in the cabin.
