Curated by Andrés Aguilar Caro
BienCuadrado Gallery · July 5–27, 2025
In collaboration with Experimental Photo Festival 2025
The City, the Flash, and the Trace
Some cities never stop talking. Their voices echo in broken tiles, in graffiti peeling from forgotten corners, in light that bounces off metal and disappears before we can frame it. Instant Flashes, Urban Traces is born from this tension, the impossible wish to pause the fleeting, to hold on to what was never meant to last. Set in the heart of Barcelona’s Gothic Quarter, the exhibition brings together 13 international artists working with Polaroid and instant photography, each one confronting the city in their own way.
Curated by Andrés Aguilar Caro, Instant Photographer’s Director, and hosted at the powerful space of BienCuadrado Gallery, this group exhibition forms part of the official programme of the Experimental Photo Festival 2025, a gathering known for its dedication to non-conventional photography and global artistic dialogue. The show doesn’t just showcase images, it stages encounters. Between people and places. Between formats and gestures. Between what the eye sees and what the image becomes.
Here, instant photography is more than a medium—it’s a way of thinking. Fast, raw, physical. There’s no undo button. The artists don’t erase; they layer, they scratch, they project, they recompose. Each image is a mark left behind, like a sticker on a lamp post or a mural on a crumbling wall. And like the city itself, the exhibition invites you to slow down, to look closely, to trace the invisible lines between memory and transformation.
Through collage, installation, mixed media, street reflections, or chemical accidents, the works form a collective rhythm, a pulse that belongs as much to São Paulo, Florence, Berlin, or Puerto Viejo as it does to Barcelona. The urban landscape becomes both canvas and subject, sometimes sacred, sometimes playful, always alive.
This is not a nostalgic tribute to the past. It is a living dialogue with the now, where instant film becomes a tool for freedom, for reflection, and for reimagining how we look at the world around us. In the spirit of the Experimental Photo Festival, Instant Flashes, Urban Traces is not about capturing the perfect image. It’s about letting go—and finding something even more real in the process.
The Artists:
Each of the 13 artists in Instant Flashes, Urban Traces brings a unique conversation with the city, through Polaroid and instant formats, they explore layers of memory, movement, and meaning. These works don’t simply depict urban life; they respond to it, reshape it, and sometimes resist it altogether.
Alex Mehiel (USA)
In the tropical climate of Puerto Viejo, Costa Rica, Alex Mehiel left her Polaroids to the mercy of heat and humidity. Nature intervened, fungi grew over the film, transforming the images into soft, dreamlike apparitions. Her three pieces glow with energy and imperfection, turning photographic accidents into visual poetry. The result is a collaboration between medium and environment, fleeting presences blurred by memory and light.
Andrea Cassady (Venezuela/Spain)
Andrea presents two Polaroids from her ongoing exploration of kink and identity. Focusing on Pup Play, she captures the dynamic between control and surrender, roles that are more about instinct and trust than sexuality. Her portraits are stripped of spectacle, revealing a quiet intimacy and curiosity. They invite us to consider how power and vulnerability play out, even in the most unexpected places.
Anika Neese (Germany)
In Socialist Panel Building, Deconstruction, Anika reconfigures Berlin’s rigid architectural past into something fragmented and alive. Her cut-up Polaroids are remounted with magnetic backs, allowing the work to shift, like the city itself. Each piece resists finality, asking us to rethink structures not just physically, but socially. This is memory remade with intention, and a celebration of the imperfect.
Clare Marie Bailey (Wales)
Clare’s work, The Haunting of the Self in Time, captures the tension between presence and disappearance. Her ghostlike figures float through urban space, blurred and fading, suggesting that identity is never static. The city becomes a backdrop for personal transformation, a place where we appear, vanish, and leave traces behind. Her double exposures feel like memory caught mid-flicker.
Cromwell Schubarth (USA)
With Gnarly, Cromwell documents the strange journey of a sculpture moved from a London park to a fenced-off lot in San Jose. Shot in yellow duochrome and presented as a loose Polaroid mosaic, the piece feels more like a street paste-up than a gallery work. It asks: What happens when public art is removed from the public? And what does it mean when something meant to invite becomes something that excludes?
Erin O’Leary (USA/Germany)
In No Borders, Erin overlays Polaroid transparencies on plexiglass, building a layered portrait of Berlin as a city in constant negotiation with itself. Graffiti, barricades, and fragments of protest images speak to shifting boundaries, personal, political, and spatial. Her process reflects the complexity of urban transformation, where nothing is stable and every image is part of something larger.
Felicita Russo (Italy)
Felicita’s ICONOID series treats the Polaroid frame as a window to the surreal. Using light painting techniques with fibre-optic brushes and flashlights, she creates dreamlike compositions that hover between real and imagined. Her pieces are quiet portals, delicate, luminous, and deeply personal. Each one holds a sense of mystery, like a whispered thought caught in colour.
Gabi Torres (Venezuela/Spain)
Gabi moves fluidly between photography, painting, and installation. Her mixed-media piece blends projection, cutouts, and urban textures to immerse the viewer in a shifting play of light and form. In her second work, a Polaroid is painted with precise geometric shapes, giving it an architectural quality. Both pieces celebrate transformation, of space, of image, of medium, and remind us that photography doesn’t have to stop at the surface.
Jennifer Rumbach (Germany)
Jennifer brings us two Polaroids that quietly speak volumes. One captures a familiar city kiosk; the other, a woman walking toward industrial towers. Taken with expired Polaroid 669 film, the tones are soft and slightly unstable, matching the themes of contrast, freedom, and societal expectation. These are not just scenes, but emotional atmospheres shaped by place.
Mila Nijinsky (France)
In Concrete Ritual, Mila turns fragments of urban life into something sacred. Her installation pairs a large fabric print with a small concrete-and-metal sculpture, surrounded by Polaroids that act like found relics. She invites viewers to kneel, to reflect, to look closer. Her work transforms the overlooked, mirrors, rubble, broken light, into quiet altars for fleeting moments.
Natalia Romay (Argentina/Spain)
Natalia’s diptych, Lisbon, outside. Lisbon, inside, uses Polaroid destruction to build new cityscapes from old surfaces. Inspired by Portuguese tiles, she pieces together visual puzzles that blur the line between memory and imagination. The result is a Lisbon that feels both historic and invented, a metaphor for how cities shape us and how we, in turn, reshape them.
Paolo DellaCiana (Italy)
Paolo’s Nocturnal Veins transforms Florence’s night into movement and mark-making. His Polaroid lift-offs are layered with spray paint and urban calligraphy, evoking veins of light through shadow. The work feels alive, vibrating with rhythm and instinct, blending the rawness of graffiti with the softness of watercolour. It’s a portrait of the city after dark, pulsing with energy we often overlook.
Polaroscope (Spain)
Under the name Polaroscope, Isabel Alcántara presents two sculptural Polaroid interventions that speak of time, erosion, and generational tension. Palimpsest overlays resin, plastic, and concrete textures onto the image, like a wall rewritten over and over. This Corrosion embeds an hourglass inside the work, visualizing time not as something passing, but something that wears down and transforms. Both pieces are dense, physical, and unapologetically urban, a tactile response to everything the city tries to erase.