I would like to share with you my participation in the artwork XOXOXOLOLOLOL, by the artist Thiago Hersan, exhibited at the II Festival de Arte e Tecnologia de Atibaia, to be held between July, 2nd and October, 28th 2016 at Incubadora de Artistas in Atibaia/SP, Brazil.
Hersan’s artistic research presents a critical perspective over social media. The artist developed a series of projects that inquire the limits and extensions of the standardization, classification and automatization of our interactions and affection exchange through digital media.
In his last action, XOXOXOLOLOLOL, he makes a kiss-shaped mold of his own mouth and distributes a stamping kit to his social network all over the world, as you can see in the picture above. Last Spring I got one of them and started using it in several contexts. However, specially for the exhibition in Atibaia, I made a video-performance called Where the memory of your kisses is not visual.
It consists in a poetic dialogue between XOXOXOLOLOLOL and my current research interests on the visual field of a monocular person that I am, which are also expressed in my ongoing project Self-portrait of an absence.
As an exercise on the failed search for measuring affection, the video documents the performance in which I stamp my own body with Hersan’s kiss mold in every part I am able to see with my left and seeing eye. The experiment deals with intimate aspects in a rational manner, proposing like an analog, flesh-based data visualization of what, for me, is invisible. It is a shared intimacy.
Frames extracted from the video. Recorded in Klöntal, Switzerland.