Senyera Award 2025

Sueño ligero is the title of the winning work of the 2025 Senyera d'Arts Visuals award, created by Rocío Garriga, senior lecturer in the Sculpture Department of the Faculty of Fine Arts at the Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV).

Rocío Garriga, who has been nominated for this award several times and was a finalist in 2024, has won the 2025 edition, which had a higher number of entries than the previous one. She considers the award, worth €12,000, as 'a boost, a recognition that I greatly value, mainly because it has taken place here in Valencia. In this city, I trained as an artist, where I live and work as an educator'.

Criticism of cumbersome bureaucracy

Sueño ligero (Light Sleep), which will become part of the artistic heritage of the City Council of Valencia, consists of two elements connected by the same colour, orange-red. One element is a landscape made from the pages of six copies of Franz Kafka's novel The Castle, and the second is an image of a Papaver somniferum, an opium poppy, printed on paper. The work will be on display at the Atarazanas del Grao in Valencia until 18 January.

According to Rocío Garriga, the work 'starts from what Kafka means in his novel, from personal experience and also from the experience of other people around me when faced with the excessive paperwork that is sometimes required to resolve the simplest of matters'.

Thus, Sueño ligero shows a territory 'suspended between the legible and the veiled'. The red and orange tones of the opium poppy flower, which stain the pages of The Castle, serve as a metaphor for what happens in this story, a text that, when turned into a landscape, sees its reading truncated," explains the artist, who, in addition to a degree in Fine Arts from the UPV, also has a degree in Philosophy from the University of Valencia.

The landscape, measuring 130 x 195 x 3.5 cm, is made from the pages of Kafka's novel, bathed in coloured wax. The colour print of the Papaver somniferum is on 300 gsm paper and mounted on a white-finished wooden support (32 x 23.5 x 3.5 cm).

She combines teaching, research and artistic creation

Born in La Roda (Albacete), Rocío Garriga travelled to Valencia to study Fine Arts at the UPV, where she also completed a Master's Degree in Artistic Production and defended her PhD thesis. As the Deputy Director of the Sculpture Department, she conducts her research at the Intermedia Creations Laboratory.

With a lot of hard work, she combines teaching with research and her work as an artist. She finds it 'very rewarding to be able to teach what I do and what I focus my research on, because artistic creation is part of it. Both teaching and research require a lot of dedication. However, in many ways the relationship between them is direct, and I think this has a positive impact on the students.'

Winning this award was one of her challenges. She is surely already thinking of some for the new year. For now, she is focusing on her work with the same friends she made during her student days and with the academic staff who taught her at the Faculty, who are very present in her memory. "They taught me so much, they transformed my outlook and taught me how important art is in cultural terms, the enormous role it plays in society. One of my motivations as an educator lies in being able to pass on to my students the values that they taught me."