Time Travel is an installation piece that has an aquarium, hair, video projection, sounds, and photography.

I have created a room, a room where you can see through a window to the inside. The window is also an aquarium; it is the aquarium that I have been working with before. It contains water and my hair. The hair is swimming and it goes in circles. There are two oxygens that give life and movement to the hair, the hair rotates, there are three different pieces of haircuts. From the beginning, I have put them separately but with time they have gathered, they have started to attach to each other, and they have started to create a different shape. The three of them are rotating, they are counting a time.

When I arrived in Finland in 2013, I left an aquarium at my house in Colombia, since then I have cut and kept my hair from time to time. Throughout the years of my trip to Finland, the aquarium has been following me in the spirit, has been navigating my life, dreams, and subconsciousness. Without reason, I began to notice that my hair had a connection to the fish I had in Colombia. In this piece, I am exploring the emotions of longing and the physical and mental state of time travel from my home country, Colombia, to Finland.

Minun Kieltä is a video installation that was screened at one of the central metro stations in Helsinki, Finland. Paola is projected on the images of an article in the national newspaper, she is trying to communicate through the article. Paola reads the only words she can understand from the newspaper.

This video is related to the process of learning a new language living in a foreign country. On the day of the exhibition, many people (mostly foreigners) asked her about the piece, some told that they felt related when they heard my voice trying to speak in Finnish.

Politics creates cultural and economic divides between people, sometimes without taking any consideration of the people involved. The Installation explores these notions of separation and the choice we have to accept it or rebel against it by interacting with the unseen “other”

In the form of a wall, The Other Side creates a unique sensory experience the viewer from themselves and those around them. Using variables such as sight, sound, touch, and human interaction The Other Side explores new ways of communicating. Stay awhile, interact, delve into the unknown. The people involved in this project are students from different nations and disciplines at Aalto University; School of Arts, Design, and Architecture and University of the Arts, Theatre Academy, in Helsinki. The students have been responsible for the concept, design, and realization of the exhibit.

Winner at Prague Quadrennial of Performance Design and Space 2015

Gold Medal PQ 2015 for Best Exposition in the Student Section
1st Place: Children’s Audience Award: Finland

Literary translation is a core subject for writers in times of Diaspora: The right to listen, the right to be read... The mutation of language is also a path between disciplines, a path that looks for a different way of understanding. Perhaps all these hindrances in language are hiding an underlying problem inequality; equal understanding and equal rights.

Mutanttikieltä is an experimental poetry video installation that was displayed in the windows of the cultural center of Helsinki downtown. Every poet was projected to each of the windows. All the windows were facing one of the most concurrent streets in Helsinki.
This project is featuring international writers residing in Finland and Northern Europe.

It is live visual performance art (VJ performance). The Installation represents the human being from the intimacy by means of Manuel (Character in the footage). Through two windows that function as image layers, It shows certain meanings with the sound design which complement the narrative of the work.

The videos, sound, and performance were made by Paola Guzmán in December 2013, Bogotá, Colombia.

Newspaper HBL 28th September 2019
“Paola Guzmán Figueroa's ambitious and psychoanalytically charged entirety "time travel" must be mentioned. The versatile installation consists of video, photography, light, shadow and an aquarium in which dark hair swims around. What may have been a chaotic cacophony is mature and cohesive, unpleasant but well restrained”