EMMA PIDRÉ: BUILT TO HOLD - DISCIPLINE AND POWER

Emma Pidré (b. Buenos Aires, Argentina) is an Argentinian-Spanish artist working between Berlin, Basel, and Mexico City. Pidré has exhibited widely across Latin America and Europe, with recent presentations including Born to Blossom, Bloom to Perish at Nasal (Lima) and Poetry as a Form of Resistance at Kunsthalle Palazzo (Liestal).

Pidré’s sculptural practice revolves around the politics of space, control, and intimacy. Using CNC-cut wood, bioplastics, steel bolts, jewellery, charms, and found objects, Pidré builds installations that rework visual vocabularies from Gothic architecture, industrial design, and techno subcultures. These works reflect on how systems - legal, architectural, affective - discipline bodies, and how ornament, often dismissed as decorative, can become a medium of resistance.

The visual language is precise yet overloaded, historically dense but distinctly contemporary. As shown in recent works, Pidré is less concerned with abstraction than with how structure becomes personal: how it touches skin, codes desire, and carries memory.

Ornament as Ideology

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell / Post-Loos (Gate)

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell / Post-Loos (Gate) (2023) is installed at the entrance of Kunsthalle Palazzo, functioning as both sculpture and threshold. Its title references William Blake’s visionary poem and Adolf Loos’s 1908 anti-ornament manifesto. Two symmetrical panels made of CNC-cut beech and walnut wood stretch like skeletal wings, laced with jewellery, charms, and chains. The structure rests on steel legs, recalling a hybrid between a medieval reliquary and a security gate.

This piece directly critiques the legacy of rationalist architecture and its claim to neutrality. Rather than rejecting ornament, Pidré uses it to confront how formal austerity has historically coded out subjectivity - particularly emotion, gender, and cultural plurality. The Gothic references are not simply aesthetic: they point to a visual system historically tied to both religious control and symbolic transcendence. In the negative space between structure and decoration, Pidré inserts a demand for contradiction: control systems are never immaculate, and purity is itself a fiction of power.

Gothic Erotics and Structures of Control :Till Death Do Us Part

Till Death Do Us Part (2025) leans against the wall like a devotional diptych or a double cell. Constructed from CNC-cut beech wood, black steel bolts, and metal charms, the two vertical panels echo both punishment devices and intimate furniture. The title references the romantic language of commitment, while the form evokes trials, bindings, and architectural confinement.

The artist writes that the piece “is about witches, eternal love promises, punishment, simulations in medieval Basel, and more.” This framing makes visible the overlap between eroticism and discipline, desire and design. The symmetry is clinical, almost ritualistic, while the handcrafted surface holds tactile memory. As with many of Pidré’s works, the Gothic is not nostalgic - it’s structural. It operates here as a critical method, revealing how historically gendered bodies were (and still are) shaped, held, or sacrificed by systems of belief and control.

Post-Internet Grids and Colonial Residues: Hierba del Sapo

With Hierba del Sapo (2025), Pidré shifts into a more modular, grid-based language. The work is composed of CNC-cut aluminium, bolts, locks, PLA bioplastic, and dangling silver charms. The result resembles a flattened security grille - part architectural fragment, part altar, part interface.

The work reflects Pidré’s interest in the aesthetic codes of subculture and class mobility. Pidré addresses the “appropriation of ‘low’ culture aesthetics and its elements by upper-class society and vice versa” as part of a broader investigation into how visual systems organise power and desire. In Nasal’s exhibition, the sculpture enclosed not a body but a plant - eryngium heterophyllum, or Hierba del Sapo - a medicinal herb central to Aztec and Maya traditions.

Emma Pidré’s sculptures do not simply critique systems of power - they recreate them, fracture them, and render them emotionally legible. Materials such as wood and steel point to craft, utility, and punishment. At the intersection of Gothic and post-industrial aesthetics, these works draw on a legacy of alienation—how form can separate us from our bodies - and reintroduce the erotic, the excessive, the affective.

In doing so, Pidré reminds us that no system is neutral. Through visual contradiction and material repetition, their practice suggests that to ornament is to remember, and to construct is always, also, to control.

Images: © Emma Pidré, Courtesy of the Artist

Editor: Biyao (Katie) Yu