EXVOT STUDY (2016)
concert-installation for three performers, interactive film on canvas, water, tiny bells (50’).
Photo by Mayah Kadish
The piece was premièred by Mayah Kadish, Elischa Kaminer and Sara Cubarsi at the R.O.D. Concert Hall at the California Institute of the Arts in 2016.
For the making of the projected video, the ear exvoto was placed in a hollow structure made of an aluminum sheet, a mass of clay and chalk, and some violet minerals placed bellow the opaque exvoto. Behind the aluminum, there is an iron which heats up the sheet and, on the other side, the exvoto becomes liquid wax (transparent) and reveals the violet minerals which unpredictably became redish, forming a new body, triggering new resemblances – perhaps a jaw, a woman’s ovary, a crater in Jupiter... At the same time, the video is projected on a canvas covered in white wax and chalk, occupying only a central rectangle. Below the wax and chalk, in the video area, there is a black square, and behind the canvas a silicone heater. As the film progresses and the ear dissolves, the screen experiences a similar transformation, and it also liquefies. So we could say that heat is used as a means, or medium, for activating change. However, doesn’t heat become so present through the material that is being heated, and perceived through the material’s consequential visual change? Heat is embodied in the material, and the medium becomes substance within the material. In the piece, all the materials enter a vivid moving assemblage that eventually destroys itself, becomes a residue of itself.
By the canvas, there are three figures, three performers, sitting in three chairs. They perform a simple choreography that involves shaking bells, rubbing bells, crushing bells, gurgling water, gurgling bells, and finally spitting bells in the position of a vow, with their head hanging between their legs. There are multiple connections between the video visuals and the performance, including the wax bubbles to which the gurgling is synchronized in sound, the round shape of the bubbles and the bells, the symbol of the bell as a nexus between the physical and the incorporeal. The choreography also resembles a ritualistic event, and becomes for the performers a durational challenge that is quite uncomfortable (also with it’s own residues: neck/back-ache from the intense gurgling).
