This comic-essay deals with the transformations that digital culture brings about in the ways that culture is accessed. Through a visual metaphor based on the popular comic strip13 Rue del Percebe created by Francisco Ibáñez, Mery Cuesta spells out the subversions that digital culture (which takes the shape of a thick fog) produces in the hierarchical categorizations of culture that inhabit our unconscious (high culture, official culture, underground, etc.). In the process, she concentrates on two concrete behaviours that are unfolding under the influence of that fog: the appearance of new subcultural forms and the growing phenomenon of neo-chastity. La Rue del Percebe de la Cultura is, into the bargain, a funny and racy fusion of the language of the comic with art criticism.

Mery Cuesta. Bilbao, 1975. Art critic, exhibition curator and cartoonist. Obtained the Espais Award for Art Criticism thanks to which she published her first essay on Spanish experimental cinema in Spain since the 1970s. She has been a regular contributor to the Cultura/s de La Vanguardia supplement since 2002. As a curator she has produced several projects and exhibitions in connection with popular culture, outsider art and the working mechanisms of contemporary art, including Videoclisión (CGAC), Rock the Jury (Centre d’Art Santa Mònica), Low Cost (FAD), Quinquis de los 80: Cine, prensa y calle (CCCB, La Casa Encendida, Alhóndiga Bilbao), La mano izquierda de Cervantes (Instituto Cervantes de Estambul) and Humor Absurdo (Artium). Where the world of the comic is concerned, she is the director of the Postgraduate Diploma in Comic and Illustration of the Elisava School in Barcelona, has published two albums and contributes sketches on a regular basis to several magazines and fanzines. Mery also plays the drums n the punk rock group Crapulesque. 

www.merycuesta.com