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2023




CECILIA BENGOLEA
Synchronized Serpent, (2021)
Hybrid creatures, half land and half water, move in unison in the Caribbean Sea, in front of Alligator Head Bay in Jamaica. From their movement other figures emerge, shaped by the very fluidity of water. The figures and background dance in harmony. 

In the dance between the waves unfold all the infinite possibilities of movement that our earthbound bodies do not yet contemplate, in a natural choreography that is liberating and indefinable yet at the same time instinctively comprehensible to all. For Cecilia Bengolea (Argentina), water—and especially humidity—represents the natural environment for the transmission of sensations, movements, emotions and ancestral knowledge that cannot be explained with words. For years she has explored the islands of the world through dance, her training discipline, and in the Caribbean islands she has found the most vibrant forms and practices in the world, where fluid movements of the spine activate and transmit primordial vibrations common to all bodies since before birth.

"Synchronized Serpent" is born from the collaboration between the artist and the Jamaican national synchronized swimming team, coached by Olympic gold medalist Olga Novokshchenova.


CAROLINE DEODAT
Landslides, (2020)
On the island of Mauritius, in an indefinite time between dusk and dawn, a dancer moves mysteriously through places and landscapes charged with meanings and mythologies. His movements are those of a ghost dance, or rather, of a dance with a ghost: the ghost of Sega, a Mauritian art form typical of enslaved Black populations that united poetry, music and dance and which for some decades has remained only as a tourist performance.

Through archiving, done entirely by non-local authors, a martial couples dance that prepared for war has become a souvenir show. Stripped of its most authentic features and—for the foreign eye—controversial, sexual and bodily aspects, Sega becomes an instrument of entertainment and therefore of control over cultural expressions and local physicalities through a tourist economy that promises Mauritians they can be part of modernity as long as they commit to playing the role of the "exotic." 

If Sega has truly been lost in its origins and roots, then it can only be evoked as a specter; and in the spectral narrative of "Landslides" Caroline Deodat makes the echo of a distant but still creeping violence reverberate, managing to evoke its presence with the force of the invisible.


MIKA ROTTENBERG
NoNoseKnows, (2015)
Starting from the pearl industry, the empty residential complexes of post-boom China and the gestures of daily life that, observed from the outside, always appear absurd, Mika Rottenberg introduces her work as a "diagram of our shrinking world."

The blonde and white protagonist of the film moves in a wheelchair through the empty residential complexes of the Chinese middle class and feeds with her sneezes an army of Asian workers who tirelessly extract pearls from thousands of oysters. 

In a continuous and incessant circle, one production cycle after another, the absurdity of the world of work emerges, which, after decades of realism, surrenders to the surrealism of a reality so strange that it surpasses fiction. 



LIZ MAGIC LASER
Primal Speech, (2016)
Media and especially the language of politics have permeated every sphere of life and society, creating real mental islands from which it is very difficult to escape, sinking into the mental mud of neurosis. 

One way to do this, according to the experiment by artist and performer Liz Magic Laser (USA), could be primal therapy, that type of psychotherapy in which patients confront their inner pain—especially childhood traumas—in an instinctive manner rather than through reasoning and words. 

If it's true that no man is an island, it's also true that society is increasingly an archipelago of solitudes. But an archipelago can be navigated, crossed, known, seeking empathy through common points between pains that are only apparently different from each other. The first step is to free oneself from the ballast.



DEBORAH STRATMAN
Xenoi, (2016)
The Greek island of Syros is visited by a series of unexpected guests. Immutable forms, outside of time, detached observers of our human condition. Platonic solids that appear in brief distortions of visual and auditory perception.

Panoramically, through beaches, caves, seascapes and architectural failures, Deborah Stratman shows a series of landscapes devoid of inhabitants, before inexplicably filling every space dramatically with a myriad of computer-generated objects, levitating, diamond-shaped forms that shine with light and radiate color. These structures, generated to conform to a sort of mathematical formula, oscillate their form before an audience of no one, accompanied by a myriad of disorienting and shrieking sound effects. 

Xenoi, "the strangers," through abstraction reflects on the paradox of the condition of those who find themselves being foreigners on an island perhaps very similar to their place of origin, forced to conform to arid and forcibly universal concepts that little reflect the complexity and fluidity of reality. 



TABITA REZAIRE
Deep Down Tidal, (2017)
If water could speak, what secrets might it reveal?

Observing the infrastructure of submarine fiber optic cables that transfer our digital data, it is surprising to realize that the cables are layered on colonial maritime routes. Once again the seabed becomes the interface for painful but celebrated progress that masks the violent deeds of modernity. 

"Deep Down Tidal" navigates the ocean as a cemetery for the knowledge and technologies of African civilizations. From Atlantis to the slave trade, or to the asylum seekers currently drowning in the Mediterranean, the oceanic abyss carries lost stories and interrupted lineages, while simultaneously providing the global infrastructure for our current telecommunications. The work of Tabita Rezaire (French Guiana) delves into the power of water as a conductive medium for communications. 

From submarine cables to submerged cities, drowned bodies, hidden stories of navigation and transmissions of sacred signals, the ocean hosts a complex ensemble of communication networks. As modern information technologies become ubiquitous in our industrialized realities, we urgently need to understand the cultural, political and environmental forces that have shaped them.


GIULIA CRIVELLARO
A general state of loneliness, (2019)
Eating food in complete solitude, in front of a camera, watched by people equally isolated on their screens kilometers away. 

Eating food collectively, dividing it into parts, making it a fundamental part of a liturgical ritual common to dozens of religions in the world. 

Food as a shared moment in different ways responds to the necessity of not feeling isolated, of feeling part of something greater. 

But what happens when food and eating become fetish and an entire culture concentrates on repeated and ostentatious moments of consumption of dishes? What role does food assume when it becomes identity religion?

In "A general state of loneliness" Giulia Crivellaro juxtaposes images and sounds of realities only apparently distant, stripping the concept of tradition to capture it in its most paradoxical and ironic aspects.



MERIEM BENNANI
Guided Tour of a Spill (CAPSInterlude), (2021)
 Do you remember when teleportation was invented and all the people who dreamed of leaving their country began projecting themselves from one end of the Earth to the other?

That fantastic period lasted briefly, because soon border guards found a way to block teleporters halfway through their journey, and that's when the disasters began. 

In the second chapter of her trilogy "Life on the CAPS," Meriem Bennani (Morocco, USA) takes us on a tour of an artificial island, Caps—short for capsules, not capital. Caps is an island in the middle of the Atlantic, created by the American border police, where the interrupted bodies of migrants intercepted during teleportation are made to land. Fragmented, mutilated and transformed, the migrants find themselves creating a new temporary but suspended civilization in a potentially eternal wait. 

Hybrid cultures, improvised infrastructures and fugitive identities layer in the narrative of Fiona, a talking crocodile protagonist of the only cereal brand present on the island. Humorous, inventive and wild, Bennani's work celebrates everything in life that is ungovernable: data leaks and viral videos; the circulation of illegal information among diaspora communities; the desire to party even in the most oppressive environments.

"Guided tour of a spill (CAPS interlude)" is a new type of teleportation fantasy—not a dream of easy travel—but a pop tribute to outlaw practices that transcend even the most hostile spaces of confinement.




LOUISE HERVÉ & CLOVIS MAILLET
Un Passage d’eau, (2014)
Off the coast of a seaside resort, a group of amateur archaeologists dive into ancient shipwreck sites, trying to preserve their discoveries from the devastations of sea and time. 

In a seaside town, a health institute offers spa guests the possibility to take advantage of the sea's benefits to rejuvenate, while in former beach establishments a mysterious group of retirees has formed a circle whose main purpose is to gain access to eternal life.

It is a scientific fact that humans know more about the solar system than about the marine depths. Nevertheless, science and pseudoscience continue to find in the sea and marine creatures a hope for improving—or sometimes just extending—the lives of terrestrials.

On the edge of the unknown and the absurd unfolds the work of Louise Hervé and Clovis Maillet, "Un passage d'eau", which addresses questions of anthropocentrism and post-humanity by asking the question: does the future of humanity lie underwater?



YUYAN WANG
One Thousand and One Attempts to Be an Ocean, (2021)
In the work of Yuyan Wang, whose translated title is "One Thousand and One Attempts to Become an Ocean," disturbance and satisfaction coexist in an unstoppable sequence in which images and words crash into each other, fragmenting, mixing, transforming into something that disappears as soon as you think you've managed to grasp it. 

It is literally a bogiaísso of aesthetics that spin like a vortex, breathlessly. This "catalog of the ocean" does not intend to produce any objective truth, but a moment of absorption and fascination. It is a documentary about an impossible experience or an experience of the impossible. 

In the futile attempt to contain the ocean with bare hands, one of the most universal emotions of our time is expressed: the desire to find balance in the vertigo we feel when faced with infinite possibilities.



JUDITH  NEUNHÄUSERER
Can’t you feel the heat wave, darling?, (2022)
The work of Judith Neuenhäuserer comes directly from the Arctic Circle, where every day islands of ice are born and die under the sun and under the effect of constantly changing climate. 

In her work different levels of reading coexist. At first glance, it is a work that shows with great aesthetic synthesis the inner indifference toward the evident problems of climate. Going deeper, one encounters the narrative of the need for human connection even in a context completely adverse to human life itself. Thus two parallel and independent temporal planes are born: the human one of the protagonists engaged in a candlelit dinner on a rubber boat, and the geological one of the surrounding environment.

"Can't you feel the heatwave darling?" is a silent yet extremely noisy work, navigated with irony on the edge of the precipice.
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