Watching Murmurs
'Watching murmurs' is an ongoing research project.
Its first instalment will be a performance piece with video interaction and live music at the Nachtigall in Museum Fur Natur Berlin.
This performance explores the theme of the nightingale within a non-linear narrative. In this piece I will continue investigating the boundaries of the illustration practice by combining animated illustration and performance, questioning realities and assumed models.
The central topic of the research, the parallel between humans and birds, gives way to the exploration of five main themes:
flight vs entrapment
journey and migration
flight as inner/ emotional voyage
bird as aspirational qualities/ bird as longing
manmade vs nature
These main themes, encountered in literary texts such as Ovid’s “Metamorphosis “, Anderson’s ‘The nightingale’, or the nightingale and the rose of Persian texts and Oscar Wilde (amongst others), are the base for the analogies with our contemporary human condition as well as with social and ecological issues.
About the process:
I have always been interested in the poetry of images, in how art puts forwards an emotional understanding of subjects. But it was only recently that I understood how this creation of poetry in my practice could expand from the purely autobiographical and become a reflection of the world around me.
As an interdisciplinary artist my practice is based on the interaction between a variety of media. In the studio I experiment with different materials that gradually connect and give me the direction of the pieces I am producing.
I have come to see that photography often takes a central role in my process. The awareness of how light affects a subject will often play a part in how I construct my images. I believe that it is also my connection to photography that has influenced my achromatic pallet and the use of symbolic colour in my work.
In recent years I have become interested in exploring the boundaries of the illustration practice and seeing how it can be spatialised when combined with other media, particularly in a performance or installation context. This is how I started working on “Watching Murmurs”
I believe that the possibilities of the three dimensional work allow me to think the potentialities of narrative with more ease. I need to be able to manipulate and displace things in space and this is why I tend to privilege installation, performance, collage, cut paper and stop-motion animation.
I have been researching ideas of co-construction of meaning with the audience through layered information and the use of non-linear narrative. I believe that it is in the space left to the audience to project themselves into the work that the emotional connection with the work itself and its subject matter takes place. An open or non-linear narrative creates opportunities for this type of engagement, for the manipulation and reordering of the concepts presented according to the audience’s own experiences. It is this holistic understanding of something, because we are not only intellectualising it but living it, sensing it, interpreting it, making it ours, that can open barriers, raise questions, make us consider, and ultimately promote change. It is through this emotional understanding of what surrounds us that art can open the door to tolerance and active change in this uncertain world.
