terra mater, 2023
Terra Mater is a site-specific creation for the Castello dell’Acciaiolo’s pomarium dedicated to the element earth, womb of life and bed of death. Matter, memory, landscape, rebirth. The visual artist and performer Isabel Rodriguez Ramos, her face covered, will appear with prostheses and mirrors applied to her body. She will then lie on an earthen womb, embracing an ostrich egg, as if motherhood were external to her being. On a similar earthen womb the audience can lie down, reflecting themselves in the performer’s body. In this way a game of both estrangement and recognition will come to life, following a paradoxical line. Rossana De Pace, the sound artist of the Gea Collective duo, will in parallel create a live soundscape, using the support of Plantsplay, a biorhythm converter that transforms the physiological activity of plants into music. De Pace thus weaves a dialogue between the voice of the soul, the voice of the place and the voices of the beings that inhabit it. Thanks to sensors applied to an ancient holm oak tree, it will be possible to listen to, record and amplify the sounds arising from its electrical activity in real time and transform the internal vibrations into music.
Nutida festival; 2023 (Scandicci, FI). Gea Collective. Technical partner PlantsPlay.
memento, 2023
A reflection on collective memory and the memory of place, a space of exchange and community, a hybrid time that emerges in the present through the past. It is a site-specific performative act that necessarily implies the construction of a large-scale brain and the active participation of the audience. The public is invited to take part in the performance by creating connections between the bodies of the artists and the body of the sculpture by means of electric cables.
Liminalica festival; 2023 (Calafou, ES)
trans.fusione, 2023
Through the study, collection and transplantation of Bryophytes, the artist creates semi-autonomous micro-ecosystems by making textile art, sculpture and living nature coexist in his research. The textile sculpture represents the first stage in the transformation of the organic landscape, which undergoes a real life cycle, giving the works an ephemeral and limitedly predictable character. The performance, inspired by the research and cultivation of mosses and lichens, carries within it a strong symbolic and archetypal charge, proposing to generate a profound reflection on the biological link that connects us to the environment, a phenomenon made irrefutable by the most recent studies in the field of epigenetics and neuroscience. We speak of physical and social environment, but also emotional, intellectual and spiritual. This constant interconnection and mutual influence allows the Human to evolve and change in iteration with the Whole.Trans.fusione – is a performative act that engages the community through a simple but vital gesture: giving water. The public is invited to participate in the narrative of the work by activating baffles and taps connected to drippers that, filled with liquid organic mixtures, infuse the sculptures and the artist’s body with water. Heart and brain. Love and intellect. What is fundamental is collective action and individual responsibility for care.
Communi voluntate show, event by Palazzo Ateliè, Drim Contemporary Art Ground, Dr. Fake Cabinet; 2023 (San Raffaele Cimena, TO)
Isabel Rodriguez Ramos © 2023