Project Presentation
Nectar takes place at the boundaries between intimacy and security. In it, the artist’s body is covered by clusters of latex gloves containing baby powder, air and milk. The gloves render a body that resembles a white flower or coral moving gently on the ground. The form is softly lit in green and blue, recalling the cold atmosphere found in transition spaces such as airports, hospitals or examination rooms. Latex gloves are usually used when examining an Other’s body, as a precaution, but also as a permission to feel. As a boundary, they embody the distance between touch and anonymity. The performance begins in stillness as the audience faces the latex form on the ground. Slowly, the exposed hands of the artist rise form within it in an offering. She holds in her hands ten sharp metallic needles. Slowly and then incessantly, people begin to grab the needles and poking at the gloves, deflowering the form at sight to reveal the performer’s body below. The artist’s action was simple: she felt without looking, touching others sensually as she felt them come close. By shedding the boundaries of touch, the work shifts form the sterile to the fertile.
Carolina Trigo (1975) is based in Finland. Her work is performance and installation based. It explores aspects of co-habitation by observing the fragile inter-dependencies between the foreign and the familiar. She departs from the notion that there is no individuality outside plurality, and extends this notion into her choice of materials. Trigo works mostly with mass-produced consumer goods. With dependable objects generated through repetition—Safe and common to all, or at least to most. Her work strives to bend the function of the ordinary into a phenomenon. To expose the moments in which a function stops making sense and reveals its Otherness. A similar otherness we share in the form of intimacy, distance and loss of control.
Trigo has taught at the Southern California Institute of Architecture’s Mediascapes, Visual Studies and Scifi Graduate Programs, at UCLA / Design & Media Arts, at Art Center College of Design and at Tama Art University in Tokyo (as Visiting Professor). She is currently completing her PhD dissertation at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland. Her work has been exhibited in Finland, Argentina and the United States.
