The Center of Art Experiences Pozu Santa Bárbara (PZSB) in Mieres (Asturias), located in La Rebaldana, Turón, is the first mining pit in Spain recognized as a Cultural Heritage Site (BIC) with the highest level of heritage protection since 2008. Since 2021, it has evolved into a benchmark for contemporary artistic interventions.
Next Tuesday, October 6 the compressor room at PZSB will reopen its doors to the exhibition Data Fossils, by French artist and filmmaker Anne Horel, a retrospective that invites us to view the internet as a stratified repository of digital culture. The exhibition has been organized by the Town Council of Mieres and curated by L.E.V. (Laboratorio de Electrónica Visual).
Anne Horel has been working with material circulating online since 2009. She cuts, recycles and reassembles images from a wide range of sources to create a world of her own, indebted to the traditions of historical photomontage and Surrealism, where pop culture takes centre stage: celebrities turned into icons, memes functioning as a shared language, filters, GIFs and avatars. The emergence of artificial intelligence has not represented a rupture in her practice, but rather a natural continuation of it, as the errors and unexpected distortions produced by these tools fit seamlessly with the illogical logic of collage. Her relationship with technology, however, is never naive: her works explore how AI is reshaping our perception, our identity and our relationship with truth.
It is this tension between celebration and critique that brings the exhibition into dialogue with Pozu Santa Bárbara. Data Fossils invites us to think of the internet as a geological landscape, one whose layers accumulate over time, are compressed and ultimately mined. The early visual culture of the web has not disappeared. Instead, it has become a vast reservoir of material, continually mined to feed today’s systems for the automated generation of images and text. The language of the digital economy makes this connection strikingly clear, with its talk of data mining, deposits and prospecting. To explore these ideas in a site that stood as a symbol of heavy industry for eighty years means looking beyond the tendency to associate extraction and its costs with the past. It means recognising the continuity between the economy that shaped these valleys and the one that now shapes our digital environment.
The exhibition invites visitors to explore five layers at their own pace, each filled with humour, saturation and excess, taking them from the surface of the screen to what lies hidden beneath it.
Fossil Feed brings together collages produced between 2009 and 2026, alongside the triptych Good Soup, a pop altar to contemporary deities. Data Forage delves into the hidden side of data and features the Digital Imprint Calculator, a tool developed by the artist herself that allows users to estimate the material impact of their everyday use of networked devices and services. Data Party revisits the more playful side of the internet through a selection of music videos created by the artist. Content Creature presents a contemporary bestiary built from filters, where anyone can briefly transform into a creature. Finally, Stories brings together her short films, which have received awards at international festivals, in which collage comes to life to tell contemporary fables.
With Data Fossils, Pozu Santa Bárbara continues the direction it has pursued in recent years: that of a heritage site that does not simply preserve its history, but brings it into dialogue with the questions of the present. Having explored the memory of mining and imagined the digital future of the underground, the centre now turns its attention to the visual culture that has grown up on our screens, only to discover that it, too, has its own layers, deposits and costs.
_About Anne Horel
Anne Horel is a French artist, filmmaker and digital collagist whose work explores the intersection of mythology, digital culture and artificial intelligence. Working across film, installation and moving images, she develops speculative narratives that examine how technology reshapes perception, identity and collective imagination
Her work has been exhibited at venues such as the Grand Palais Immersif in Paris, the Max Ernst Museum and Bozar, while her latest short film, La Tisseuse d’Ombres, won the award for Best Use of AI at the Artefact AI Film Festival in 2026, as well as the Press Prize at the WAIFF World A.I. Film Festival. In 2026, she presented the video installation La señal está abierta at L.E.V. Festival, a work conceived specifically for the Chapel of San Esteban del Mar in Gijón.
Arranged by: Ayuntamiento de Mieres
Curated by: L.E.V. (Laboratorio de Electrónica Visual)
PRACTICAL INFORMATION
Location:
Pozu Santa Bárbara, La Rebaldana, Turón (Mieres, Asturias)
Dates:
From May 14 to August 16
Schedule:
Wednesday, Thursday and Friday from 16:30 to 20:30 h
Saturday, Sundays and and holidays: 11:00 to 14:00 h and 16:30 to 20:30 h
(closed on December 24, 25 and 31 2026 and January 1 2027)
Opening
Tuesday 6 October, 19.00h
Free entrance
Recommended transport:
Public bus Emutsa. Stop PZSB: La Rebaldana (down) +INFO
By car (free parking)
Access by foot or bicycle Senda Verde de Turón P.R. AS-100.1 +INFO
