Co-Natural
by Alexandra Pirici
Curated by Helga Christofferson
The New Museum, NYC
Performers - Julie Brandano, Farid Fairuz, Paula Gherghe, Miguel Angel Guzmán, Jordan Isadore, and Jennifer Tchiakpe
Light, set, and holographic display design- Andrei Dinu
Holographic Pepper’s Ghost display - Archi3D LIMITED
Director of photography - Barbu Balasoiu
Alexandra Pirici’s new work, Co-natural (2018), is an ongoing action with live performers and a holographic image. The work considers the increasing fragmentation of presence and self, enabled by digital technologies, financialization, and, more broadly, by modernity’s division of nature from culture, body from mind or spirit, and individual from collective. Co-natural attempts to enact a dispersion of bodily presence, commenting on contemporary processes of abstraction that separate sign from substance and image from material support. Yet the work also mines this fragmentation for its potential to create a different idea of the self, one distributed across time, space, bodies, history, and memory.
This new work, conceived especially for the New Museum’s South Galleries, continues Pirici’s recent interrogations of the collective body through choreography that links different temporal and spatial events in real time. Exploring memorials and monuments; artworks and objects in museum collections, lost, or stored in freeports; as well as abstractions of the living subject into quantifiable, monetizable data—through physical bodies, voice, and ghostly images—the work resituates them in new relations and entanglements. Pirici contextualizes the hologram, a fragment of a “whole,” through live action; the hologram becomes a mediator of presence, revealing the ways in which images and living bodies influence each other. Co-natural proposes a single, modular organism made of both living and digital matter that gradually assembles and disperses again over the course of each day of the exhibition.