Nicolás Gullotta Brief statement I work in a variety of mediums, including performance, sculpture and installation. My work is a performative process in relation to particular situations and places. Place has a very particular psychological presence. In the work process, I establish an exchange between places, history and materials in order to interrogate their meanings. In some sense, the work exists as an experimental set of actions that insert absurdity into an everyday transaction. This action interrupts and expands the pre-existing common sense structures and systems that govern our environment. I usually turn to a person or a group to perform an unexpected task or role within my work. This small-scale social engineering creates relationships, interpolations and contradictions and allows these to become the subject of the poetic. During the process, each step gives way to the next and creates a spiral of absurd actions, culminating in a moment that generates hybrid questions.
Transcript
Nicolás Gullotta Brief statement
I work in a variety of mediums, including performance, sculpture and installation. My work is a performative process in relation to particular situations and places. Place has a very particular psychological presence. In the work process, I establish an exchange between places, history and materials in order to interrogate their meanings. In some sense, the work exists as an experimental set of actions that insert absurdity into an everyday transaction. This action interrupts and expands the pre-existing common sense structures and systems that govern our environment. I usually turn to a person or a group to perform an unexpected task or role within my work. This small-scale social engineering creates relationships, interpolations and contradictions and allows these to become the subject of the poetic. During the process, each step gives way to the next and creates a spiral of absurd actions, culminating in a moment that generates hybrid questions.
Fit in the human body / rhythm # 1
2017
Aluminum ingot, car paint.150 cm x 100 cm x 55 cm
Corner piece builded with 250 kilos of standard recycled aluminum ingots. The ingots were painted with car paint -black and fluorescent yellow - the highest contrast the human eye can capture. The sculpture works with the delineation of the corporeality of room and our boundary of optical colour range.
Burnt secuence
2017
Pineapple, molecules, polyethylene, light tube.
Modified molecules that reproduce an artificial "burnt plastic" odor were housed in a group of pineapples arranged in a spatial sequence.
Sound of a machine
2016
16 mm FilmTransfer to HDColor, sound1:02 minutesLoopStill image
A professional trainer trained a parrot native from Bolivia in order to imitate a sound that makes a 16 mm camera (continuous "click" measured in foot the passage of the film by the camera). Then the parrot was filmed performing the sound of the camera.
Sound of a machine201616 mm FilmTransfer to HDColor, sound01:02 minutesLoopStill image
Introspección
2015
35mm slide projector Kodak Ektagraphic E2 from the School of Natural Sciences (UBA), 81 scanning electromicrographs black & white, metal base. Variable dimensions.
E-2, serial number 5262089
The slides, 81 analog images that rotate at regular intervals, are copies of the results obtained through an electron microscope upon the presentation of samples of the alloys, glass, plastics and other materials present in the Kodak EKTAGRAPHIC Slide Projector, model E-2, property of the School of Natural Sciences (University of Buenos Aires) and given on loan to take part in this work that has it as narrator and case study.In turn, the microscope, belonging to the Argentine Museum of Natural Sciences, plays the role of neutral interviewer, a microphone or pocket recorder with whom the projector can perform a self-analysis and spit his internal reporting, his account of furry materials like sprouted onions and metal parts that could be meringue sculptures.The copies, made in different magnifications (between 2000 and 10000 times), turn platinum and in some sections are even blinded, as the projector light heats the surrounding space. In the splendor of a primitive and ultravisible image, we see faded materials because of their own mechanical friction; each turn in the carousel's long university career generated imperceptible cracks and clashes between its parts that the electrons, tuned by voltage and emptiness, recognize as they bounce on the tests: helmets of an alloy that look like petals, the contortions of the plastic and the wrinkles of the copper come with the drama of the pure depth of field. Marie Antoinette, tired of the court of Versailles, decided to build a tiny personal universe that she called her village in the Petit Trianon, a neoclassical building surrounded by gardens recently opened by her father-in-law, Louis XV. The Queen's mind projected her fantasy on the walls, on the small bushes, on the pergolas with grandiloquent names, on the game and music rooms. Of each room and every corner she made a fragment of her innermost self. E-2, serial number 5262089, has the similar privilege of seeing its guts turned into a spectacle and into a kind of upholstery. The scanning microscope used in the inquiry can strike on the matter in a narrow wavelength impossible for the ordinary light, and allows to recognize subliminal morphological structures, repressed conflicts whose main characters might be the last layer of the casting of a screw or some trembling glass filament; in the jargon of laboratory workers, each "specimen" before falling under the electron beam must be covered with an alloy of gold and palladium, which adds a layer of matte silver and uniforms it to the bites of various substances that conform the tests. When the work is presented again, this same projector that until recently lived in the lethargy of a closet, in the dead paths of scientific bureaucracy, will turn its lights back on and tell its hidden material life, enhanced by four or five orders of magnitude. (Claudio Iglesias)
Introspección201535 mm slide proyector Kodak Ektagraphic E2 from the School of Natural Sciences (UBA)81 scanning electromicrographs black & white,metal base. Variable dimensions. Detail.
Introspección201535 mm slide proyector Kodak Ektagraphic E2 from the School of Natural Sciences (UBA)81 scanning electromicrographs black & white,metal base. Variable dimensions. Detail.
Magnetism (52º13´50.56N 4º44´41.04E / 51º55´29.39N 4º30´11.20E). 2013Photography19 cm x 50 cm
Many people, one lake
2014
With New England's landscape as a background, two psychics communicate with the spirit of a lake in order to document the last days of a tribe which inhabited its shore. During the seance the lake becomes a sensitive witness, recovering the lost spaces of the traumatic colonialist past and bringing to the present visions about the relation of the native tribe Abenaki with their surroundings, and the reasons for their departure.
Audio sample:
“I’m getting the sense of a ... other smaller creatures that were here that they would hunt for not just for food.”
“I have a picture of an orange full moon looking through the trees andI would like to give a, sort of a prosperity note, uh, a continuation note that, uh, there isn’t an end but a history that will keep going and keep maintaing, uh, for as, as long as the planet is here.”
Many people, one lake. 2014Aerial photography19 cm x 50 cm
Many people, one lake. 2014Installation view Variable dimensions
A container filled with sauerkraut was placed at the back of a vegetarian restaurant in Rotterdam. This sauerkraut had been treated with magnetic therapy by an alternative health practitioner residing in a different Dutch city. This storage for sauerkraut was built on a platform adjacent to the restaurant´s building, as if it were an accessory to its architecture. On this platform two 220 liters tanks kept 60 kilograms of chopped cabbage which was left to ferment for a five weeks.
Alternative magnetic therapy departs from the idea that organisms are susceptible to the effects of a “universal fluid magnetism”, which affects them without the need for direct physical contact. The artist asked the therapist, which usually works on people or animals, to influence on the process of cabbage fermentation, as part of the manufacturing of the sauerkraut. The practitioner directed a range of high energy usually associated with spiritual phenomena towards the cabbage in Rotterdam. The treatment was done from the city of Aalsmeer, where the therapist resides.
With the idea of displaying the effect of magnetization which had made in the sauerkraut, two samples were sent to the photo lab Paul den Hollander, in the city of Breda, who recorded the samples with a camera Kirlian, a type of photography that records the object subjected to an electromagnetic field.
Magnetism (52º13´50.56N 4º44´41.04E / 51º55´29.39N 4º30´11.20E). 2013Photography19 cm x 50 cm
Fast, strong and sweet.
2013
Two interconnected machines. A wired circuit converts energy produced by people exercising on treadmills at a gym into the necessary power to feed the blender in a vending cart that offers smoothies. The electrical energy generated by the movement of runners is stored in a battery which powers the blender at the cart located at the door of the gym´s building. The cart offers smoothies made with milk, chocolate, sugar and banana. The idea was to depart from the concept of human power, taking advantage of the kinetic energy that a gym may generate to enable the working of a food cart. The continuum between the energy generated and the energy spent resulted in a deficit: the energy necessary to make the blender work was greater than the calories delivered in each smoothie.
Fast, strong and sweet 2013Performance Variable dimensions
Fast, strong and sweet 2013Performance Variable dimensions
Fast, strong and sweet 2013Performance Variable dimensions
Congreso de Fenómenos Espaciales S.I.M.A Symposium on Outer Space Phenomena
2011
Project developed in collaboration with Luis Amaya (Sociologist), Andrea Pérez Simondini (UFO Specialist), Ariel Sánchez Ríos (Air Force, Uruguay) and Hugo Marraco (Astronomer).
The objective of this work was to set an interchange among a sociologist, a UFO specialist, an astronomer and an Air Force pilot. A group of specialists in U.F.O.s would have the chance to present their latest research. Based on this idea we organized a Symposium on Outer Space Phenomena at the exhibitions space of the Centro Cultural de España en Buenos Aires (a well regarded and attended cultural center). During three days the specialists presented their works and exchanged with the public. It was promoted through ads plastered onto the walls of the Buenos Aires´ subway system.
The opening presentation was made by Colonel Ariel Sánchez Ríos, Air Force of Uruguay. During the event we presented the design for a the first interplanetary flag and we added signatures to the petition made by Argentinean U.F.O specialists to our local Air Force to open a special division devoted to the study and recording of U.F.O. sightings. As the result, some months later the Commission for the Study of Aero-Spatial Phenomena -Comisión de Estudio de Fenómenos Aeroespaciales CEFAE- was created.
www.faa.mill.ar/prensa/cefae.html
Congreso de Fenómenos Espaciales2010Installation view Variable dimensions
Congreso de Fenómenos Espaciales2010Installation viewVariable dimensions
Congreso de Fenómenos Espaciales2010Installation view Variable dimensions
