Disappearing Bodies

Disappearing Bodies

2021

Interactive sculpture

pvc, metal display stand, aluminium cnc cut sculptural pieces, Raspberry Pi, Thermal Camera, mini lcd screen, plexi

80x75x120 cm

Disappearing Bodies is an interactive installation created for the Orto Botanico Comunale di Lucca during the COVID-19 pandemic, a period shaped by restricted movement and isolation. The work responds to the botanical garden as a site where vulnerable forms of life are preserved, classified and displayed. Within this setting, disappearance becomes something both resisted and made visible. Suspended inside the greenhouse is a hollow garment that preserves the outline of an absent body. Made from transparent material, the form echoes the surrounding architecture of steel and glass and partially dissolves into its environment. Its elongated silhouette carries traces of inherited social expectations, while refusing to reveal the identity or gender of the body expected to inhabit it. A thermal camera registers the heat of visitors and translates their bodies into shifting  elds of colour. Familiar physical features disappear, leaving temporary images that change with movement, distance and temperature. The body remains perceptible, but can no longer be read through its usual visual markers. Created as a non-performance, the installation replaces the performing body with an empty form, while visitors enter the work through the traces of their own heat. Disappearing Bodies considers whether becoming less visible might create space for forms of embodiment that resist fixed social roles and established ways of being seen.

Exhibited at Giungla.fest, Ortobotanico.lucca by s.o.f.arts ▪️In collaboration with Çanakkale Biennial ▪️ Curated by Irene Panzani ▪️Supported by Deniz Erbas and SANATORIUM for the transportation▪️📸 Photo Credit Martina Angeli