Alèxia Ponce is a Barcelona-based audiovisual designer and animator. Her process looks like this: soaking and scrunching paper, letting it dry into form; moving geometric shapes frame by frame across the surface of a puzzle; burning a moment onto photosensitive paper with sunlight. The result is frames — hundreds per sequence, accumulated into animation. Her 2026 film Qui trepitgi la ratlla (Who Steps on the Line) extends this logic to children's drawings: she has children draw their own imaginary worlds, then animates those drawings frame by frame, until the traces of play are set back into motion.

But something deeper is happening here. Ponce is not constructing frames. She is harvesting remainders. Every support she uses is a product of a system that has already completed itself. Industrial papermaking produces a sheet of paper — that sheet is the system's final form, its already-construct. When Ponce soaks and crumples it, she activates the papermaking system's own remainder: the fiber's memory, the paper's physical resistance to moisture, the crease-forms that were always latent beneath the smooth surface, never intended to appear. That crease is not her design. It is the residue of a completed system — the trace of energy the papermaking process could never fully control. The puzzle is another finished object, designed to assemble into a recognizable image, its already-construct state total. She moves across its surface and lets the puzzle's seams, its color-field divisions, its per-piece outlines, become the accidental structural ground of her animation. She finds the frame's geometry inside the puzzle's remainder.

Sun printing works the same way. Photochemical processes have long been absorbed into art history — cyanotype, anthotype, photogram, each with a name, a market, a wall in a museum. Ponce doesn't use light-sensitive materials to make a finished print. She uses solar chemical action as a single frame in an animation sequence. A frame, not a finished work. This distinction is decisive: she cuts the remainder of an already-construct technique (the one-time appearance of solar chemistry at a particular moment) into a unit of animation time, rather than letting it be an endpoint. In SAE terms, this is remainder-taking (余项的取用) — re-routing the residual energy of completed systems back into the entry point of a new chisel-construct cycle.

Qui trepitgi la ratlla pushes this structure to its clearest expression. The act of children's play is a system; the drawings are its remainder — the traces that survive after play ends, images that belonged to the game, not to art. She re-animates those traces, setting the remainder of children's play back into motion. The chisel-construct cycle is especially legible here: play (chisel) → drawing (construct, simultaneously remainder) → animation (new chisel) → film (new construct). Her work is waiting at the entry point of each cycle, taking the remainder out of the last construct, rather than building from nothing.

The art world currently names this "analogue animation" or "materials-based animation." These are phenomenal descriptions, not structural analyses. The logic of remainder-harvesting — taking a completed system's residue as generative material — has no name. Today, August 12, 2026, It's Nice That gave Ponce her first major English-language profile, but framed it as "unexpected materials and methods" — still at the surface level. This is exactly what the beauty of the remainder looks like: approached, but not yet named. The chisel-construct cycle has not arrived. The logic is still alive. The reason to see it now is that it is still a remainder; once named, it becomes construct.

Han Qin (秦汉) · @hqinjarsy · SAE Judgment & Aesthetics