Welcome: (a) ceremony (installation and performance)
The choice on materiality for the table is part of a broader research on hospitality and intimacy in the domestic space, ultimately represented through an installation and performance. By staging intimacy, roles shifts are evident and shaped, with the guest /audience performing their position and feelings according to a given framework and power, played by the host / performer. Unfolding in several spaces and scenographies, the performance starts with the act of receiving and awaiting, with the audience seated around a 12 meters long table and the performer interacting and moving freely around and on top of it. By picking elements of a domestic space, audience and performance find themselves equally part of the play and put on the same level, constantly negotiating the table, the frame of the role and power play. Consequently, its materiality mirrors the different roles of the table in the play: as a stage it shows the evolutions of the roles, through its anthropomorphic surface, a body that almost takes shape during the play, as a landscape it reveals the times of this process, through cracks and hills; craters and incrustations.
Additional information
The material choices and mixture had to meet two necessities: artistically, it needed to resemble skin, while pragmatically it needed to be easily produced, as it needed to cover a relatively large surface. Various types of organic starches were investigated to eventually choose potato, because of its peculiar translucency and light reflection, similar to the grease of human skin. A combination of oil from seeds and coconut was adopted for malleability and to avoid surface cracking during drying phase.
Future paths to further develop the project would be to replace the current glue by a more sustainable alternative.
Information submitted by the maker and edited by the Future Materials Bank.
Ingredients
Potato starch, oil, glue, red, yellow, blue colour pigment.
Credits
Every Island is composed by: Alessandro Cugola, Damir Draganic, Martina Genovesi, Caterina Malavolti, Juliane Seehawer. Performers: Victor Dumont, Caterina Danzico.