Joana Vasconcelos / Artworks / Contamination

Contamination

Sound

Contaminação [Contamination] is presented in the form of a huge, strange and tentacular textile body of multiple colors and shapes, resulting in a chimerical synthesis of previous works of the artist. Techniques, materials, textures, forms and colours revealed in such seminal works as Pantelmina #1 [2001], Pega #1 [Potholder #1, 2002], Valquíria #1 [Valkyrie #1, 2004], or Blup [2002] and Paredinha [Tiny Wall, 2003], are retaken here in a process of direct relationship with architecture.

This installation invades the space of the museum contaminating it and interfering with the experience of place felt by the observer. The orgiastic effect generated by the explosion of shapes, textures and colours sort of reincarnates dionysian values in sharp contrast to the apollonian dimension of the rational and disciplined organisation of architectural space.

At a time when the principles of safety and health tower over everyday life and the spirit of transgression is euphemistically reinterpreted, Contamination reintroduces the dionysian paradigm, highlighting the power of hedonism and sensuality of the customs.

Here this irregularly extended and disperse space is also a dynamic and fluid transaction which seems to negate its own cohesion as well as its own physical singularity. In this way this work precludes the possibility of a closed homogeneous and fixed space, fomenting instead an unstable, changing, hybrid and almost intractable mediation; a space that can acquire a labyrinthine quality in its spatial multiplicity ; a space that, upon extending itself, constantly repeats itself as a variant that seems to continually threaten the integrity of the work itself, or perhaps its intention.

Octavio Zaya