3D installation by Genesis Victoria
This project was born regarding the necessity of space and the impossibility of performative practices due to the context of the pandemic Covid-19.
“Ophiopogon” is an expansion of my artistic research on embodied listening, voice and tension. But also the question of intimacy in digital spaces.
I tried to abstract all the performative experiences and knowledge into a synthesized gesture in the economy of a 3D environment.
The sounds are recordings of performative explorations on voice, tension, wind, loneliness/connection, constraints. It is indeed a dialogue between different forms of register and documenting a performative process, an ongoing post-net gesture.
Ophiopogon is a kind of black-grass commonly used to cure mouth sores but also as an antiseptic and sedative that helps with anxiety, insomnia and restlessness.
You are (not) alone*
Before coming up with this idea, I was doing research regarding Shibari, sound and voice. I started to research this subject with my installation “Tied”. In general, the idea was to explore a posthuman affection with the speaker where the tidying was the method that I’ve found to create a certain desire-machine-quimera.
After that, and due to the pandemic conext, my performative practices were redirected into the intimate space, and slowly I began to learn Unity as my new medium. The questions were : How to perform a 3D space? Which are the possibilities and how can I translate,transfer, sublime my previous performance experiences into it?
Slowly, as affects moves, I had (have) the luck to meet and work with 3 artists regarding my research but also trying to cope, with all the measurements, with the loneliness of the screen.
In one hand, in conjunction with the artist Kayla Elrod, we started to develop a series of exercises regarding the relation with weights, voice and displacement in space. But also intimacy.
On the other hand, I’ve been working with Ann Antidote and Lunario exploring the possibilities of rope, noise and queerness.
Finally, due to the ongoing restriction, I decided to build a 3D installation. Here, I tried to abstract all the knowledge of my previous experiences into a 3D environment. Some of it important points were (are):
- Restrains
- Restrains affects the way that voice emerged but also shapes it
- Restrain allow to boundaries and draw a zone of consentment
- Listening is essential to this consentment practice
- Constraints allows the creation of the space (spaces)
- There are diverse approached to experiences – narrative/ phenomenological
- Creatures appeared.
- We have the impulse to create a safe but honest space. Beauty in its rawness.
Even though all this knowledge is present somehow, this piece is about loneliness and trying to find calm in the middle of the storm….on the top of a giant field/creature’s fur made of relaxing black grass.
Self-hanging Voices
In Ophiopogon, there are 3 big deflated figures, complaining, exploring, recordings of myself trying to give voice to the cavities inside without the balsam of beauty or singing. Just an honest exploration of these restraints. To create the voices of these giant beings, I actually recorded myself in an empty hallway of my place; a transitory space that appeared after the false ceiling was removed. After warming it up, I decided that each voice should respond to different constraints. For example, what happens with my voice if my feet are restrained or what happens with my voice if I’m hanging from my hands. In that way, I try to replicate -alone- the experience of being tied by someone else. An attempt of connection, relation, trying to overcome loneliness in a self-reflective action. Like a self-feedback system. Sometimes self-observation could be weird, painful, but we just need to overcome the threshold of shyness/shame and find our voice-s.
Sometimes I feel strange weights inside of me, weights that I cannot avoid. It is helpful to give them a form. To shape the anguish. Anguish is the results of our separation from the experience. Is the latent feeling of disembodiment. The menace of the gap that twirls into ourselves, filling us with a heavy nothingness. A hard stone to swallow and process. These voices are an attempt to self-hang, symbolically and not, from different parts of your body and try to take that out.
Post-Net Field Recordings
One of the strategies, suggested by my project supervisor Franziska Windisch, was to try field recordings. As part of an embodied research I decided to fly a kite in Tempelhofer field. My partner in crime was Kayla. I did understand that Flying a kite could be very aggressive but very meditative at the same time. It could be a way to relate to an immense force such as wind through a minimal constraint.
Continuing with this interchange, Kayla also provided me some grass recordings that she made while she was back in the U.S. Overlapping spaces and times.
In that sense, my 3D space has been a digital portal to actually enact actions in the physical world (such as field recording) and vice versa. A typical post-net operation, methodology. Thus, these field recordings resulted in the perfect bridge between performative practices and the 3D space. Like I said, I don’t know if it is possible or necessary to translate all of this to the 3D space. Is not necessary, because this has their own interspecificity, its own in-between, and that it is very interesting for me. Instead of translate; relate, intra-action.
Further planes are, as it was suggested by Kayla, a future performance where this 3D installation could be integrated, responding to this post-net impulse to create a site-specific performance. I’m looking forward to actually exploring its possibilities, its back and forwards from the digital to the analog world.
*Yes, this is a reference to Evangelion.
