Super
2026
Local
Open studio: Small worlds that come to life and Beyond the entrepreneurial spell
In this talk, Poli Verrua walks through her career as a stop motion director and artist, exploring how she built a way of seeing and a place of her own within Latin American stop motion. Drawing on her experience in direction, art, animation, illustration, puppet making and production, she shares her creative processes and the different disciplines that converge in the making of a stop motion piece. The talk offers a look behind the scenes of her projects and at the challenges of the craft within a language as handmade, interdisciplinary and magical as stop motion.
This talk presents a trilogy of audiovisual projects made with video game engines — “UNKRNS: Más allá del hechizo emprendedor”, “UNKRNS: RENTAR O REVENTAR” and “UNKRNS: Smart Angels Inc.” —, which takes as its starting point the mythological figure of the “unicorn” — that fabulous creature that today names tech startups valued at more than a billion dollars — to explore the spaces and imaginaries that hold up contemporary digital culture.
Through the crossing of critical spatial practices and world building, the series proposes new ways of thinking and narrating digital infrastructures from a perspective situated in the global south. The research and production process behind the trilogy will be shared, along with the questions that run through it: what mythologies hold up digital capitalism? How are the territories and the materialities behind the workings of the internet narrated? And what other stories need telling?
Poli Verrua
Poli Verrua is an interdisciplinary stop motion director and artist from Córdoba, Argentina. Her practice combines directing, art direction, animation, illustration and puppet making, taking part in fiction, documentary, advertising and animation projects with production companies in Argentina and abroad.
She is the creator, director and co-writer of Las Aventuras hacia Terraverde, a series in advanced development that has taken part in international labs, markets and platforms such as LAB IMPULSAR, Ventana Sur Animation!, Premios Quirino, Stop Motion México, SMOF, PLUM! and APA LAB, among others. She is a co-founder of Pururú Studio, a production company specialized in stop motion animation, where she develops projects with an all-round approach.
Her recent work includes Pueblo Chico, Pido Pausa, Plaki y la Sorimanchis and Serendipity, on which she worked in art direction, puppet making, animation and direction coordination roles. In 2024 she directed the music video VEO for La Yegros, selected at festivals such as Anima Latina, SMOF, PLUM!, Festival Cartón and Bogotá Video Music Festival.
She is also actively involved in animation teaching and outreach, giving talks, workshops and training sessions at universities, institutions and festivals in Argentina and Latin America. She is a member of the Asociación de Productoras de Animación de Córdoba (APA).
UNKRNS Studio (Sebastián Lambert y Diego Morera)
UNKRNS STUDIO critically interweaves the fields of spatial practices, digital culture and video art to build new narratives about digital infrastructures from the south.
It is made up of Sebastián Lambert and Diego Morera, who were co-curators of the Uruguayan Pavilion at the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale and have taken part in international exhibitions and residencies, among them Tabakalera in San Sebastián, the Residencias Remotas program in Chile, the Mayrit Bienal in Madrid and the exhibition “Are You For Real?” in Montevideo. They made the video games “UNKRNS: Más allá del hechizo emprendedor” and “UNKRNS: RENTAR O REVENTAR”, which were shown in Uruguay, Chile, Argentina and Spain and won Third Prize at the 52nd Premio Montevideo Artes Visuales.