Sensual archaeology
11:56:00
The body has its own memory, a mysterious one, impossible to
access because it is purely physical, foreign to the language. It was formed
out of the randomly mixed information belonging to other bodies which lived
before me. My DNA, spread everywhere, in the hairs I lose, a
unique code of the body I am, of the body in which I woke up - a carcass I
did not choose and which I cannot leave. The navel is the memory of the first
separation and the solar plexus represents the point from which the breathing emerges
into the world, regardless of my will.
„Sensual archaeology” explores the first limits I stumble upon in contact with the world, the limits of my own skin, the limits of the
uncontrollable mechanism of my body which has a life of its own, which IS life. The project dives into the world before my consciousness, the world in which, as a newborn, I
was breathing without knowing, the world I have no memories
about and which was built for me through other people’s memories.
I search for these memories around me – in people,
on their bodies – just as an archaeologist trying to uncover a silent history, cyphered,
the history of a confinement within the skin. It is the archaeology of the unique and
ephemeral intimacies I softly invade.
I collect ”fossils” of the navels, lost hairs, words invented
by children and all these “relics” have for me something sensual, not in the
erotic meaning of the term, but rather in the sense of that thrilling
sensuality I associate with human ephemerity.
The way our skin transforms over the years, getting old, while we remain
the same person inside, the fact that we hide so much under the clothes,
protecting our body as if it would be some kind of personal idol, the fact that myself,
as a woman, I bear the possibility of growing an alien inside me, a
foreign body that later will have its own will, the last touch of a dying man –
all these have for me the value of a sensuality that defines life, the same
sensuality that makes the seasons go round.
I search for traces, exploring as an archaeologist this
uncertain sensuality – relic or life of the present? – I am trying to decipher
it. Instead, I only manage to make it hide even more.
"Fossils" - casts of the navels of 100 people and ”Microscope”- spheres filled with water and human hair
”Pulsation” - casts of the solar plexus of several people
”Recording”, magnetophon, human hair
Omphalos. Cast of my mother`s navel and audio recording
I spent a variable amount of time inside a plexiglass box, hermetically closed. While breathing inside, the vapors make the walls opaque, hiding my body under the "tissue" of my own breath.
This work is about catching the materiality of breathing, but also about the idea that my own body is my master, a mechanism which will be - most of the times - stronger than myself, stronger than my will. It will always want to live and I cannot stop it run its mysterious internal processes which keep my life going, whether I like it or not. A robot I am prisoner of.
In the position of either Foetus, "Wisdom of the Earth" (Constantin Brâncuși`s sculpture) or the "Shy Man" (the fetish statue of the population in Sulawesi, Indonesia), my body dresses in its own breath, reinterpreting the aquatic environment, ephemerally writing on the walls of the box the traces of life.
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