Collaboration — Installation. A project of Nayarí Castillo, Gertrude Grossegger and Hanns Holger Rutz with Akademie Graz, AT. With the support of Land Steiermark, Graz Culture, BKA and Stiftung St. Lambrecht.
This transdisciplinary piece explores the possibilities of boundary-crossing in art. The project is a collaboration between writer Gertrude Grossegger, installation artist and trained molecular biologist Nayarí Castillo, and sound artist Hanns Holger Rutz. The three artists positioned themselves within an experimental arrangement topically structured around dynamic systems of swarming and networking based on nature to open up new connections between text, space, and sound. The project incorporates scientific research on swarm intelligence.
The spatial development of the collaboration extends itself across the room. Red light showers a compendium of fishing-traps of all latitudes, nets, antique beehives, strings, and other natural materials put together in a hazardous system that sustains 600m of cable interconnecting the 108 speakers. A conglomerate that grows naturally and elevates through (6mts) metal roof supports. Each of the three branches relates to the spinal cord making visible the almost painful joints. The strange drawn animal had a singular skin, full of ocellated structures of beeswax, the entire surface of which introduces a key element to the overall experience: smell. This conformation is different and, in its strangeness, allows itself to be an unconcerned sculptural gesture, a formation as harmonious and disharmonious as natural growth that at the same time exposes the synergies explored during the process by the think tank.
The sound installation is based on the contact between two spatial networks—one is the physical topology of the animal’s arms with a set of possible paths of traversing them. The other is a latent space created by an arrangement of the recorded text, segmented into words and phrases following the reading’s particular dynamic. A brain of 9 computers allows the action to take place.
Position in Project: Artist, co-organizer and co-curator, designer.
