I have always wondered whether our consciousness was in fact, a curse.
The fact that we are so aware of our own life, and thus, death was something so tragic yet so absurd to me. When I got diagnosed with ovarian cancer 6 years ago, it hit me: mortality was facing me and there it was: the preciousness of life, its fragility, my body, my dislocated body, my dislocated mind, the matter and its finitude. My body had created a monster, my feminity had been mutilated. It was violent.
in 2019, I created The Ephemeral life of an octopus (Aerowaves 2020). For this piece I looked at 'what' is a cancer, how does a healthy cell become unhealthy? Gynaeco-Oncologist Adeola Olaitan explained that cancer cells are 'out of control', 'chaotic'. Onco-genetician François Eisinger was the first one to tell me about the phenomenon of the Apoptosis, this is how he described it 'a healthy cell dies when it dysfunctions; and a cancer cell is a cell that dysfunctions but that has lost its ability to commit suicide'.
And I undersood the irony of a disease that was indeed, too full of life.
For Starving Dingoes, I scientifically spefically looked at the Apoptosis, it is at the centre of the work. I talked about it with Cancer specialist Alex Gentry-Maharaj, she told me about the shapes and the movements of a dying cell.
I wondered; if one dysfunctional cell cannot kill itself anymore in order to save the whole body: what do the other cells do? Do they know what's happening and can they do anything to prevent it?
I wanted to imagine and stage that they could.
It's like in a film where a group of people is lost on a desert island and to survive they have to eat one of them.
We extrapolated this idea to a group of people, country, to our planet even: what do we do when something dysfunctions? Do we outcast it, do we repair it? Or do we destroy it?
Underlying is the idea of the brutality one experiences when their body does not respond the way they should. The friction between what is expected and what is truly bubbling under.
Philosophically, we looked at notions of madness, mortality, belonging, togertheness, uncivilisation.
I believe that this piece could even be the representation of the Artist: sacrificed on the altar of our industry..
The fact that we are so aware of our own life, and thus, death was something so tragic yet so absurd to me. When I got diagnosed with ovarian cancer 6 years ago, it hit me: mortality was facing me and there it was: the preciousness of life, its fragility, my body, my dislocated body, my dislocated mind, the matter and its finitude. My body had created a monster, my feminity had been mutilated. It was violent.
in 2019, I created The Ephemeral life of an octopus (Aerowaves 2020). For this piece I looked at 'what' is a cancer, how does a healthy cell become unhealthy? Gynaeco-Oncologist Adeola Olaitan explained that cancer cells are 'out of control', 'chaotic'. Onco-genetician François Eisinger was the first one to tell me about the phenomenon of the Apoptosis, this is how he described it 'a healthy cell dies when it dysfunctions; and a cancer cell is a cell that dysfunctions but that has lost its ability to commit suicide'.
And I undersood the irony of a disease that was indeed, too full of life.
For Starving Dingoes, I scientifically spefically looked at the Apoptosis, it is at the centre of the work. I talked about it with Cancer specialist Alex Gentry-Maharaj, she told me about the shapes and the movements of a dying cell.
I wondered; if one dysfunctional cell cannot kill itself anymore in order to save the whole body: what do the other cells do? Do they know what's happening and can they do anything to prevent it?
I wanted to imagine and stage that they could.
It's like in a film where a group of people is lost on a desert island and to survive they have to eat one of them.
We extrapolated this idea to a group of people, country, to our planet even: what do we do when something dysfunctions? Do we outcast it, do we repair it? Or do we destroy it?
Underlying is the idea of the brutality one experiences when their body does not respond the way they should. The friction between what is expected and what is truly bubbling under.
Philosophically, we looked at notions of madness, mortality, belonging, togertheness, uncivilisation.
I believe that this piece could even be the representation of the Artist: sacrificed on the altar of our industry..
