Resident from September 1, 2026, until November 30, 2026
Empar Juanes (1990, Valencia) is a Spanish jewellery designer, architect and multidisciplinary artist. She researches space, tension and lightness and the relationship between object and body. She grinds and cuts rocks likes agate and basalt to thin, fragile-looking shapes. This way, she tries to push the boundaries of her materials. Her jewellery moves between wearable object and sculpture and plays with paradoxes like weight and lightness, strength and fragility, the material and immaterial. Aside from this, she works with photography, music and performance.
During her residency at DIVA museum, Juanes continues her multidisciplinary research under the name Bridges. The bridge is a metaphor for evolution and connectivity: between the past and the future, security and insecurity and material and sound. She wants to connect contemporary jewellery in stone and metal with sound art, for this her cello and synthesisers will play an important part. Based on the collection of DIVA museum and the context of Antwerp, she researches how different artistic disciplines can influence and enhance each other.
Empar Juanes studied architecture at the Universitat Politècnica de València and in addition received a diploma Art and Design at the Maastricht Academy of Fine Arts and Design. During her study years she stayed at Tsinghua University in Beijing and as an exchange student at the Hochschule Trier, Campus Idar-Oberstein. There, she established her fascination for minerals as materials for contemporary jewellery.
In 2024 Juanes received the Herbert Hofmann Preis during SCHMUCK in München. The jury awarded her work for the way she seemed to dissolve the expect weight and resistance of stone. In 202 she was selected for her line AURA as one of the thirty finalists of the LOEWE Foundation Craft Prize.
