City Screen is a program within LOOP Barcelona dedicated to presenting video art in public and cultural venues across the city. By activating screens beyond traditional gallery walls, it fosters new encounters between artworks and audiences, creating a dispersed yet interconnected exhibition of moving images throughout Barcelona.

As part of City Screen and within the framework of LOOP Art Fair, Sorondo Projects presents videos by Venezuelan artist María Elena Pombo, extending the dialogue initiated in Latin America during our recent presentations at ARTBO in Bogotá and arteBA in Buenos Aires. Our intention was to bring to Barcelona the projects that marked those two fairs and to share them with a new audience in the context of LOOP.

At ARTBO, Pombo’s project “Tejiendo el Verdín” uses water collected in January during the rainy season, when the lake’s surface was overtaken by verdín, a green algae bloom tied to pollution and ecological collapse. The piece is part of Tejiendo el Post-Petróleo, a series within They Called it Mena’, an ongoing research project exploring petroleum’s relationship to land, people, and futurity. The name Mena’ comes from the Wayuu language, where it refers to the black, viscous material that emerges from their ancestral territory.

At arteBA, Sorondo Projects presented Tejiendo la Anemoia, a project rooted in Pombo’s reconnection with Venezuelan territories after eight years abroad. The series stems from her collection of earth samples and water in Canaima National Park, developed in dialogue with Pemón communities. The resulting works, along with the video 12/01/2023: kowamä-pe (at sunset), reflect on the entanglement between nature, memory, and imagined belonging, articulating a poetic narrative of home and distance.

Through City Screen in Barcelona, both videos—El Paseo más Bonito and 12/01/2023: kowamä-pe—are now presented together, expanding Pombo’s reflection on territory, material, and shared sensibility into a new geography of viewing and resonance.