The First Metaphore Was Animal
audio & captions video - 2024
✦ During my Field of Study residency at Mirror Institute, two domesticated horses trained for dressage competition lived among us. They were recovering from severe injuries, feeding on a piece of barren land that was healing in its own way. "The First Metaphor Was Animal" was the title of the workshop I led at the residency, its name was taken from John Berger's book "Why Look at Animals?" (1980). During the workshop we sought to unravel, among other things, the dynamics involved in the process of domestication; those that are at play when confronting a non-human entity with an alien language, with its order, its hierarchies, and its contradictions, and how these processes reflect many situations in which we engage with an "other". In the specific process of animal training, the language involved becomes more specific and triggers different confluences of control and play. In this sound piece, I tried to represent those different layers where the presence of the trainer and the horse seemed to be on separate timelines and spaces, sometimes coinciding, sometimes far away from each other. For me, a lingering question remains about what happens to the new language the animal has acquired once it is alone, or when it is in pairs
Tongues and Flowers
✦ On-going series ( 2023 ~ )
✦ Color pencils on paper
The set of drawings Tongues and Flowers came through my interest in looking into 17th and 18th century still life paintings of imperial and colonial countries. I believe those portraits can give us a glimpse not only of how the concept of nature was built in Western societies but also how the ideas of what it means to be (and not to be) human were being configured. I am interested in how colonial processes were also being portrayed through these paintings, like an underlayer that comes to the surface with more clarity over time, confusing the contours of the calm figures portrayed on top. There is no innocence in still life paintings, but a static depiction of violence. Most of the flowers that were being portrayed back then were foreign, meaning that access to them was extremely exclusive and therefore only available to the upper class. The same class that during those times was profiting from their imperial trades and colonies. But with the trade of beautiful flowers and bouquets came along new pests, the intruding and disruptive figure of unwanted insects. Insects are also depicted in those paintings as vanishing witnesses of non-human life, as carriers of a secret that cannot be heard as they sing on the threshold of the violent binary that is being depicted. Insects are usually removed from their inherited quiescence and placed as decorative jewellery of a stolen and bare nature. They are placed as fake signatures of consent. What I intent to explore in my version of still life drawings are the whispered songs of kinship through the shape-shifting bodies of insects that represent for me a source of inspiring desire.
![Text on cuteness in conversation with Kari Rosenfeld - Outline Platform - 2023]()
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![Text on cuteness in conversation with Kari Rosenfeld - Outline Platform - 2023]()
![Text on cuteness in conversation with Kari Rosenfeld - Outline Platform - 2023]()
Oh! That’s Cute!: an explorative essay on cuteness w/ Kari Rosenfeld
For this e-log entry I invited my dear friend Kari Rosenfeld to spend a cute day together talking about cuteness. We dressed in a way that made us feel cute and wandered around thinking about ways to perform and inhabit cuteness in our adopted cities (Rotterdam – Berlin). Through an exchange of Telegram audio messages, links and pictures we recalled former ideas of this subject while developing new ones together.
Follow this link to listen/read more: here
The first metaphor was “animal”
workshop at Field of Study
Two domesticated horses will be living among us these few days. During our stay in the residency we will probably try to find their gaze, as an erotic gesture that anticipates the touch of our hand brushing their fur, a dream of a seamless connection, perhaps... or, an entanglement of fears. Looking at animals comes with a complexity of desires and anxieties. We will certainly be affected by the few moments of recognition, as their gaze traps ours. Those moments can feel like a treat after grieving an unspoken language or, like a magnifying lens over the mesmerizing gap that allow us to be shadow of each other.
Oh! That’s Cute! - video performance
In this performance, I delve into the spectrum of cuteness—its emotional and interpersonal dimensions, and the body language it entangles—while displaying/playing with some of its characteristic elements. Questions of how solitude and desire are represented under this aesthetic category are present throughout the piece. Changing abruptly from binary emotions like happy/cute/dominant to sad/vulnerable/submissive helps me translate some of the ideas behind what it means to be cute under late capitalism and how (if possible) we can find some potential in a type of cuteness that escapes being tokenized and can help in the building of an expanding kinship.
This piece was presented in:
✦ 2023 - OT1 - Amsterdam - The Netherlands
✦ 2021 - Post-Theater - Arnhem - The Netherlands
You can listen to the soundtrack created for this piece here!
In Between a Cute Ripple of Desire - solo show
Nieuwe Vide - Haarlem - 2021 This show was divided into four rooms, each of them tainted with different colors of light and each of them reflecting on the wide spectrum of cuteness.
✦Pink room:
In the welcoming pink room, a soundtrack was played through the speakers hanging out from the ceiling. The tracks combined musical elements of pop and hyper-pop with my voice singing melodies and jingles on top. The lyrics of the songs were ripples from the small essay I wrote about cuteness that was presented during the show as well.
In the welcoming pink room, a soundtrack was played through the speakers hanging out from the ceiling. The tracks combined musical elements of pop and hyper-pop with my voice singing melodies and jingles on top. The lyrics of the songs were ripples from the small essay I wrote about cuteness that was presented during the show as well.
✦Yellow room:
The reading room for visitors to grab a copy of the essay and read comfortably if desired.
The reading room for visitors to grab a copy of the essay and read comfortably if desired.
✦Purple room:
A video of dripping erotic fluids were played in silence.
A video of dripping erotic fluids were played in silence.
✦Cyan room:
In this part of the exhibition, you could listen to whispering thorugh a thunder, an audio track where a soundscape of a storm unfolds into a voice imitating wind and trying to speak using a single breath of air each time. Throughout the sound piece, the storm and other artificially created sounds from a “natural” environment start slowly to give space to erotic whispers and cute sounds.
The wall artworks that were shown with this sound piece were alluding to the water element of the tracks; to the artificiality of nature by imitating raindrops over a window and a mirror. The process of reducing the storm to isolated sounds until it transform into voice was also signaled on the sculptures. In one of the mirror pieces, you could read through liquid resin the phrase: “I want to feel emotion without reduction, Why don’t you drop in the floor and drip”
In this part of the exhibition, you could listen to whispering thorugh a thunder, an audio track where a soundscape of a storm unfolds into a voice imitating wind and trying to speak using a single breath of air each time. Throughout the sound piece, the storm and other artificially created sounds from a “natural” environment start slowly to give space to erotic whispers and cute sounds.
The wall artworks that were shown with this sound piece were alluding to the water element of the tracks; to the artificiality of nature by imitating raindrops over a window and a mirror. The process of reducing the storm to isolated sounds until it transform into voice was also signaled on the sculptures. In one of the mirror pieces, you could read through liquid resin the phrase: “I want to feel emotion without reduction, Why don’t you drop in the floor and drip”