Paolo Almario

A Colombian-born artist based in Chicoutimi (Québec, Canada) since 2011, Paolo Almario develops a transdisciplinary practice in which digital technologies, robotic systems and social critique interrogate the spatiality of being: the dynamic relationship between the individual and the spaces they inhabit, whether physical or metaphorical. A graduate of the Facultad de Arquitectura y Diseño of the Universidad de los Andes (Bogotá, Colombia), he refined his approach through a master's degree in art (2014) at the Université du Québec à Chicoutimi (UQAC), where he now teaches in the Département des arts, des lettres et du langage.

His works (installations, generative software and automated mechanisms) explore identity, socio-political structures and the entropy of human-machine interactions. His "tireless machines", with their methodical, programmed gestures, alter the works through the addition or subtraction of matter, embodying impermanence and systemic deconstruction. Shaped by Colombia's socio-political context and by his journey as a refugee (status obtained in Canada in 2015) and later citizen (naturalized Canadian in 2022), his practice reveals, through poetic metaphor, the destructive complexity of power relations.

Recipient of the Prix du CALQ : Créateur de l'année (Saguenay–Lac-Saint-Jean, 2018) and supported on several occasions by the Canada Council for the Arts and the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec, his work has been exhibited internationally (Canada, Colombia, Mexico, France, Italy, Morocco, Belgium, Thailand). In 2021, he co-founded Ubchihica, the first research-creation centre for digital arts in Chicoutimi, and he chairs the Conseil des arts de Saguenay, advocating for cultural innovation.

Artist Statement

At the heart of my practice lies an obsession with the spatiality of being. I study how the individual negotiates their existence within constructed environments: natural, architectural, digital or socio-political. Through custom algorithms, robotic systems and interactive installations, I dissect the interplay between human agency and the systems that seek to contain, define or erase it.

My machines are at once collaborators and antagonists. Programmed to repeat endless, precise gestures (engraving, erasing, reassembling), they transform raw data (biometric scans, environmental sensors) into evolving works. A camera captures a face; a robotic arm corrodes its projected reflection. A solenoid tears modules from a grid, pixelating identity into absence. These processes materialize entropy not as chaos but as programmed fatality, mirroring the fragility of memory and identity in digitized societies.

Rooted in my Colombian heritage and my experience as a refugee, my work critiques asymmetries of power. The "spatiality" I interrogate extends beyond physical places to encompass marginalized narratives, contested territories and the digital infrastructures of surveillance and exclusion. By fusing architectural rigour with glitch aesthetics, I invite audiences to confront their complicity in systems of control while imagining spaces of resistance.

Through my art, I cultivate dialogues where technology and critical theory meet. Art becomes a testing ground for reclaiming our agency in the age of algorithmic determinism: one relentless machine, one destabilized border at a time.