IRON WRAPPING PAPER

Video installation

by Gabriela Golder

To represent what it is not visible.
The resistance.
To penetrate in the interstices of a face, of a expression, of a emotion.
A silent explosion.

It is a mise en scene, a woman’s portrait where emotions are carried to the highest level of intensity. It is study about the expression of passions, about the possibility of capturing and perceiving the emotion. Expression and contention.

The expression of emotions through a movement, a permanent fluid in progress, an emotion not concluding to emerge when a new one appears.

A trajectory where the pain becomes unbearable, finishing with a noiseless scream. Thus, the silence appears as the end of such mechanism – mechanism that posses the dramatic intensity of an ineluctable trap.

The sequence focuses on the human being and on its face. A static close-up in a continuous slow motion take shows the subtle transformations of these mute images. The question is to reveal the transformations in the inner landscapes.

OPENING THE SPACE BETWEEN THE EMOTIONS

In “IRON WRAPPING PAPER” a big projection on the wall shows a woman who seems to be waiting for something. It shows a accumulation of time and as people come and go we see that something is happening on her face. She tries to keep her emotions hidden but it becomes impossible. Suddenly: a emotion explosion. Cry and desperation…

There will be a bunch of hidden microphones all over the space, capturing the visitors steps. These sounds will be amplified and they will trigger the woman reactions. According to their intensity, the woman, that until that moment was trying to avoid any kind of expression, will express her emotions now. Fed up of everything and motivated by others presence, she will react, explode, cry and shout. And there will be a final scream and it will be a noiseless one.

The sounds are external ones. They invade the woman. The length of this emotions trajectory depends on visitors’ actions. The woman hears and supports everything. Her body is not hers anymore and becomes a social body. A recipient.

During difficult periods, wars or crisis, the role of South American women as paradigm of resistance is crucial. Women adjust better to changes of nationality, culture, job and social role. They suddenly become the support of their homes and the creators of new hopes. They can move around and generate new dynamics of salvation.

During the migratory movements in the beginning of XXth century and during the wars, many European women migrating to Argentina and Brazil were highly concerned to build a new life abroad in order to survive and to protect their relatives, even if they did not speak the language and if they did not have any certitude about their future.
There are many examples of women assuming the role of the ones who talk, shut up, resist, hide, fight, feed and protect their families. But this women, this “every women”, experiences pains – in her humanity and flesh.

Technical information

Structure:
Projection on a wall.
Interactivity between image and sound, controlled by a computer.
Hidden microphones in the gallery.
Speakers in the gallery, creating and immersive ambience.

Technical Requirements:
Video projector over 1200 Al
DVD player
A MAC computer
Around. 10 microphones and speakers.

 

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THE ONE MADE OF LIGHT STUFF

Computer Installation
by Marcia Vaitsman

 

Not many people like them, not many people like to talk about them: the scars.

In this work many pictures of scars are put together in a kind of electronic quilt. With your fingers, on a touch screen monitor, you will touch and drag this skin with scars to movie yourself around this large tissue. Underneath the scars there are stories, dreams and expectations of people, all mixed together as a common abstract territory, a mixture of an area between the outside and the inside of the body.

There are some analogies between this work and the idea of territory, for instance, the skin as a symbol of cosmetic care, social status, age and health, and the ground as symbol of wealthy and fertility. Both cover something unknown and unpredictable. Underneath the skin and underneath the ground there are innumerous valuable instances, which are common to all people.

The human body could be seen as the biggest symbol of individuality, for some people a ground for the cult of beauty, for others a weight of pain or the remembrance that we are submitted to the laws of physics and to the laws of humans, which in other hand are based on the materiality of our bodies. Therefore I had the wish to mix organisms under a common cover, surely radically away from any gross idea of genetic manipulation or physical atrocities. In this direction I mix in only one being, the “light stuff” of the dreams and ideas, the stuff of images and voices, the finest almost immaterial way of being an organism.

The ground is marked by the time so is the skin. The skin works for our bodies as an involuntary diary of our lives. Some marks are turned to stigmas as soon as they remind the others the power of nature, the unpredictability and the fear for the unknown.

Technical information

“The One Made of Light Stuff” is an audiovisual work result of the combination of video, digital photos, music and spoken texts complied with Macromedia Director, to be exhibited on a computer, if possible a G4 Mac OSX machine, with a touch screen monitor and speakers.

 

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EMPTY / FULL

Video Installation
by Mariela Yeregui

My body as a kind of recipient. My body as a limit. Sometimes it behaves as a surface of protection: being protected from the external world, being confined into my inner space –where I feel safe, where I can have just a few certainties.

However, the contents of my body are at the same time infertile fluids. I have to fill my body with other fluids in order to make it more fertile. My body has empty areas that must be filled up if I want to trigger biological processes of multiplication.
A space that I have always considered as a full one, it suddenly became an empty space for me. I have to manipulate it if I want to change it. The ordinary space becomes an alien continent.

Trying to fill it, meanwhile I looked at people trying to fill their bodies too. They were looking for some food to eat in the garbage.

Bodies confronted to the external space. Bodies that are not adjusted to their contexts.

This video installation project deals with this dichotomy of empty/ full recipients/bodies. The visitor is meant to penetrate an inner space (=body) in order to explore empty surfaces that are, at the same time, full of subtle video images of empty bodies (hunger/sterility)
Cylindrical interconnected channels. Inside them, several monitors (around 8’ and 11’) showing close up video images of syringes being injected on human skin as well as hands turning upside down some garbage.

The visitor has to get into these channels in order to go through the piece. Creeping inside the channels, he/she will discover these video monitors –like tiny windows on the walls of the channels-, and watch how people try to fill their bodies.

The channels will be made of translucent white cloth. From outside, the shapes of visitors inside the channels will be visible for outsider visitors.

Technical information

“Empty/Full” is a video installation produced with:
10-15 color monitors
5-7 VCR
30 meters of translucent cloth
50 meters of coaxial cable
20 RCA connectors
40 meters of wire
tapes, paint and installation material