Anna Cornudella – Asymmetrical Proximity. Live Broadcast / Video Performance

Cornudella presents an interspecies relationship of friendship through a screen showing a live feed from a surveillance camera alongside a series of documents that preserve the memory of this relationship.

It is a relationship at a distance that began in March 2026, when the artist saw on her computer the live image of a small spider building and dismantling its web over the lens of a camera located on an island 10,000 km away. While the spider remains unaware of the bond it has prompted, the artist begins an epistolary relationship and observes, day after day, the condition of her little Penelope, continually making and remaking herself amid changing weather conditions and the contingencies of everyday life.

“On 5 March, through a surveillance camera trained on Anacapa Island, I see what appears to be a spider’s web. It is raining and night has fallen; a spider appears, rapidly weaving what the wind keeps tearing apart, working beneath my concerned gaze from 10,000 km away. Since then, I have followed her day by day through this device, much as Sophie Calle followed strangers in Suite Vénitienne: Please Follow Me.

I write her letters and watch as, each day, she eats her web and builds it again. This one-sided relationship makes me wonder what happens when the human gaze generates affection without reciprocal recognition. When friendship depends neither on language nor reciprocity, is it still friendship?

The camera, as a human-made device, becomes a space of accidental cohabitation that enables sustained attention towards a life that alters the way we inhabit the world.

Relationships between species are not necessarily based on understanding the other, but on allowing oneself to be affected by their presence. Here, friendship is not an emotional correspondence, but a practice of attention, observation and asymmetrical proximity.

Perhaps friendship consists in recognising the gestures of the other without ever being able to translate them completely.”

A multidisciplinary artist based in Barcelona, Anna Cornudella develops her practice primarily within the fields of film, video art, and research related to bioart and multispecies ethnography. A graduate in Film from ESCAC, she combines filmmaking with work in theatre, video and other artistic projects.

Her work explores the relationships between science, cinema and human beings, with particular attention to the hierarchical structures of society and, more significantly, to the relationship between humans, other species and the environment. Her research is oriented towards a critical examination of anthropocentrism. Her first feature film, The Human Hibernation (2024), seeks to challenge narratives of human control over nature and addresses questions that connect human cycles with broader biological cycles.