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MOMENTUM: AN AUGMENTED REALITY EXPERIENCE (AR) AT ART MADRID'25

From March 5 to 9, Montalbán street will transform into an immersive digital environment with Ciudad Sutil, an innovative augmented reality experience led by multimedia artist Susi Vetter. This project is curated in collaboration with CRU and is part of the parallel program of Art Madrid'25. The proposal invites the public to explore an alternative layer of reality through technology, offering a sublimated vision of the urban environment and the city's landscape.

Momentum. Digital scketch. WIP.

Ciudad Sutil: A new way of inhabiting urban space.

Ciudad Sutil is a program that proposes ephemeral artistic interventions in public spaces, exploring new ways of inhabiting and perceiving the city. Through digital art and augmented reality, it seeks to reveal hidden layers of the urban environment, questioning the rigidity of the built landscape and opening spaces for imagination and reflection on our relationship with the city and nature.

Susi Vetter. Momentum. AR Art Installation. Technologies used: Adobe After Effects & Photoshop, Procreate, Blender. Processor: 8th Wall. 2025.

Momentum: Redefining the relationship between City and Nature

In Momentum, the urban landscape with its ordered architecture, paved streets, and precise geometry suddenly opens up to reveal a living canvas that challenges our perception of city spaces. At the end of the street, a forest emerges between the buildings. From this wild growth, a giant mask arises, initially blank and inert, which is pushed upward toward a triangulated glass ceiling, reminiscent of the Galería de Cristal of the Palacio de Cibeles. The mask remains suspended there, between the artificial world below and the contained sky above.

Its eyes slowly open, as if seeing the world for the first time. From one of them, tender plants begin to sprout, initially shy, then with increasing vigor, transforming the sterile façade into a living, organic entity.

As nature claims the mask, the glass ceiling above it – that meticulous human attempt to frame the sky – begins to crack. Fragments of glass fall like rain, breaking the barrier between the built space and the open air. The mask, now covered in vegetation, slowly descends until it disappears.

Momentum. Digital scketch.

A reflection about the urban future

This augmented reality experience invites us to reconsider our relationship with the natural world in urban environments. The street, with its rigid lines and concrete certainty, becomes a space for exploration to imagine new forms of coexistence between the built and the organic. The mask symbolizes our artificial relationship with nature — how we perceive ourselves as separate from the wild, until nature finds ways to break into our spaces.

In the age of the Anthropocene, where human impact shapes every ecosystem, Urban Rewilding questions whether our future lies in continuous separation or in seeking new ways of coexistence between our built world and natural systems. As the boundaries between the city and the forest blur in this augmented reality experience, we glimpse possibilities for urban spaces where nature is not just a contained or decorative element, but an essential and transformative force.

Technology and creative process

The piece Momentum has been developed using various digital tools, including Adobe After Effects, Photoshop, Procreate, and Blender. Its processing is based on the 8th Wall platform, allowing for a seamless and immersive integration of virtual elements into the urban landscape.

Susi Vetter. Invited artist at Ciudad Sutil.

About the artist: Susi Vetter

Susi Vetter is an illustrator and multimedia artist based in Berlin. Her work focuses on telling immersive stories that blur the boundaries between physical and digital realities. Her tools include the web, augmented reality, and map projections, with the aim of creating experiences that invite reflection on the relationship between humans and their environment.

From March 5th to 9th, at Montalbán street 1, at the entrance of the Galería de cristal of the Palacio de Cibeles, you can enjoy Momentum.

The practice of the collective DIMASLA (Diana + Álvaro) is situated at a fertile intersection between contemporary art, ecological thinking, and a philosophy of experience that shifts the emphasis from production to attention. Faced with the visual and material acceleration of the present, their work does not propose a head-on opposition, but rather a sensitive reconciliation with time, understood as lived duration rather than as a measure. The work thus emerges as an exercise in slowing down, a pedagogy of perception where contemplating and listening become modes of knowledge.

In the work of DIMASLA (Diana + Álvaro), the territory does not function as a framework but rather as an agent. The landscape actively participates in the process, establishing a dialogical relationship reminiscent of certain eco-critical currents, in which subjectivity is decentralized and recognized as part of a broader framework. This openness implies an ethic of exposure, which is defined as the act of exposing oneself to the climate, the elements, and the unpredictable, and this means accepting vulnerability as an epistemological condition.

The materials—fabrics, pigments, and footprints—serve as surfaces for temporary inscriptions and memories, bearing the marks of time. The initial planning is conceived as an open hypothesis, allowing chance and error to act as productive forces. In this way, the artistic practice of DIMASLA (Diana + Álvaro) articulates a poetics of care and being-with, where creating is, above all, a profound way of feeling and understanding nature.

In a historical moment marked by speed and the overproduction of images, your work seems to champion slowness and listening as forms of resistance. Could it be said that your practice proposes a way of relearning time through aesthetic experience?

Diana: Yes, but more than resistance or vindication, I would speak of reconciliation—of love. It may appear slow, but it is deliberation; it is reflection. Filling time with contemplation or listening is a way of feeling. Aesthetic experience leads us along a path of reflection on what lies outside us and what lies within.

The territory does not appear in your work as a backdrop or a setting, but as an interlocutor. How do you negotiate that conversation between the artist’s will and the voice of the place, when the landscape itself participates in the creative process?

Álvaro: For us, the landscape is like a life partner or a close friend, and naturally this intimate relationship extends into our practice. We go to visit it, to be with it, to co-create together. We engage in a dialogue that goes beyond aesthetics—conversations filled with action, contemplation, understanding, and respect.

Ultimately, in a way, the landscape expresses itself through the material. We respect all the questions it poses, while at the same time valuing what unsettles us, what shapes us, and what stimulates us within this relationship.

The Conquest of the Rabbits I & II. 2021. Process.

In your approach, one senses an ethic of exposure: exposing oneself to the environment, to the weather, to others, to the unpredictable. To what extent is this vulnerability also a form of knowledge?

Diana: For us, this vulnerability teaches us a great deal—above all, humility. When we are out there and feel the cold, the rain, or the sun, we become aware of how small and insignificant we are in comparison to the grandeur and power of nature.

So yes, we understand vulnerability as a profound source of knowledge—one that helps us, among many other things, to let go of our ego and to understand that we are only a small part of a far more complex web.

Sometimes mountains cry too. 2021. Limestone rockfall, sun, rain, wind, pine resin on acrylic on natural cotton canvas, exposed on a blanket of esparto grass and limestone for two months.. 195 cm x 130 cm x 3 cm.

Your works often emerge from prolonged processes of exposure to the environment. Could it be said that the material—the fabrics, the pigments, the traces of the environment—acts as a memory that time writes on you as much as you write on it?

Álvaro: This is a topic for a long conversation, sitting on a rock—it would be very stimulating. But if experiences shape people’s inner lives and define who we are in the present moment, then I would say yes, especially in that sense.

Leaving our comfort zone has led us to learn from the perseverance of plants and the geological calm of mountains. Through this process, we have reconciled ourselves with time, with the environment, with nature, with ourselves, and even with our own practice. Just as fabrics hold the memory of a place, we have relearned how to pay attention and how to understand. Ultimately, it is a way of deepening our capacity to feel.

The fox and his tricks. 2022. Detail.

To what extent do you plan your work, and how much space do you leave for the unexpected—or even for mistakes?

Diana: Our planning is limited to an initial hypothesis. We choose the materials, colours, places, and sometimes even the specific location, but we leave as much room as possible for the unexpected to occur. In the end, that is what it is really about: allowing nature to speak and life to unfold. For us, both the unexpected and mistakes are part of the world’s complexity, and within that complexity we find a form of natural beauty.