P001 → an essay on spikey things flying at my face.
Installation (video 6’30, text, wood)
Delcia Orona
Grand Jury
Master CCC Critical Curatorial Cybermedia
HEAD - Genève
June 2024
The installation an essay on spikey things flying at my face was an explorative, ethnographic, multimodal artistic and research-based installation exploring childhood memory and delirium alongside coming-of-age sensations. In joint production with the thesis in Convulsion: Tracing collective memory via archives, material witnesses and stories from the body, the work navigates the means of processing, remembering, and revealing various personal experiences of growing up in the rural United States alongside high addiction rates, high youth death rates, lack of public infrastructure and social resources, and alongside the violence of extractive oil and gas industries in colonized, devastated landscapes. Delcia Orona
Grand Jury
Master CCC Critical Curatorial Cybermedia
HEAD - Genève
June 2024
The project included three elements: a 1.5m cubed wooden structure (the “tree house”), a film, and a text. The film and text piece were both placed inside the structure.
Your favorite e-girl
The film “your favorite e-girl” - in lo-fi, tumblr aesthetic - accompanied by a sonic lo-fi, trap beat audio (written by 5.00AM/Lucie Fernandez), aims to evoke the moment, sensation, and context of coming-of-age within this structure, and the means of transcending it - such as an audio wave, or feeling bass sensations on the outside of the structure. The scenes play with flashing, strobing, LED, quick-appearing images, and archives (both of places and environments that the artist has passed through along this journey, and of archives of tumblr imagery and lo-fi scenes) to elicit not only a nostalgic collective point of 2000s history (that included tumblr, CRT TV, lo-tech and the cusp of millennial/GenZ upbringing), but to also elicit a dually erotic and mournful moment of recklessness - or rather, rebellion - as a means of processing subconscious trauma and moving towards independence.
Essay
The essay combines these elements into a written form through the emotions of anger and confusion. The essay follows many short personal stories of the artist, which then leads into the story of a “recurring closed-eye hallucination”, and the fear of getting stuck in this constant state of psychosis resembling a habitual, unexplainable sensation, or disturbance, emerging during childhood. However, the essay ends by reconciling this fear with the dystopian nature of the perceived “real world”, admitting that these hallucinations/nightmares “were easier to focus on because they were dark and scary and didn’t try to mask themselves as anything else. Like people in my family or politicians or megastars.”
Text can be found here.
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