2018

Commissioned by Fundação Bienal de São Paolo, Brazil. Project for 33rd São Paolo Biennale, curated by Gabriel Perez-Barreiro, part of “Slow Bird” island, project curator Claudia Fontes. This project is based on layers of simultaneous and overlapping oxymorons: advanced beginner, anxious patient, resident alien, global vernacular, growing smaller, seriously funny, definitely maybe.

Gravity - Underwater - Buoyancy

The artist performed with Antonya Paskal, a ballerina from Burgas Opera, in the Black Sea at the town of Pomorie, Bulgaria. The two swimmers passed a head of cabbage back-and-forth underwater, trying to prevent it from floating to the surface.

Poison - Painkiller

The highly potent venom of a predatory marine snail from the family Terebridae is the focus of research in Dr. Mandë Holford’s laboratory at Hunter College/Weill Cornell Belfer Research Building in New York City. Dr. Holford and her team work with novel peptides based on extracted snail venom to create drugs - one thousand times stronger than morphine - as tools for managing extreme and chronic pain. The artist attended a number of the weekly sessions at which Dr. Holford discussed the ongoing research with her group. He later performed in the lab with ballet dancer Jordan Miller, and a robotic vacuum cleaner Roomba, while researchers continued their laboratory work.

The sight of sound

The artist made a human-scale replica of the venomous snail’s shell and performed with the blind ballerina Veronica Batista of Fernanda Bianchini’s Association of Ballet and Arts for the Blind, in Sao Paolo. Sound replaces sight during the performance, as the dancer and the artist play a hybrid musical instrument together - the P-flute - made with two flutes connected to a peptide-synthesis vessel.  

P-flute - Echoes - Loops

P-flute is an instrument built for times of great need, when half-truths and outright lies are the norm, and reality seems to continuously warp beyond repair. A P-flute can only be produced as an act of cross-cultural, interdisciplinary and interspecies collaboration. A shell of the marine snail is encased in the glass peptide-synthesis vessel, made in collaboration with Chuck McAlexander of Brass Lab, New York, and Adam Kennedy of Chemistry Glass Lab, Austin, Texas.

The P-flute was played at the Biennale by Veronica Battista and Daniel Bozhkov - responding to each other, and sustaining two overlapping notes. The two sounds mixed inside the peptide synthesis glass vessel and generated a third note in this polyphonic harmony. The note was recorded by the electronic musician Eddu Ferreira, who replayed it live and contemporaneously through large speakers - the repeated loops and echoes were reminiscent of what the American artist Tony Conrad called “downtown folk”, or drone music.  

Modernity and science use fast-moving venom for regulating pain, but art can also work as pharmakon, or be a poison-used-as-remedy. In age of self-medication and anesthesia, collective excitement is narco-capitalism’s greatest fear.  

Materials & Actions: 

Architectural installation incorporating a portion of the railing of Oscar Niemeyer’s Biennial Pavilion, frescoes on portable panels, large human-scale wearable replica of the venomous marine snail Terebra subulata shell, a hybrid musical instrument of two flutes connected to a peptide synthesis vessel, performances, and video. 

Locations:  

The Black Sea at Pomorie, Bulgaria; Dr. Mandë Holford’s lab at Hunter College/Weill Cornell Belfer Research 

Building, New York; Fernanda Bianchini’s Association of Ballet and Arts for the Blind, São Paolo, Brazil; Ciccillo 

Matarazzo Biennial Pavilion, Ibirapuera Park, São Paolo, Brazil.