PLEASE DO TOUCH! - BERLIN ART BANG INSTALLATION

THE HAUS - BERLIN ART BANG

"PLEASE DO TOUCH"

INSTALLATION ART

THE CONTEST

In March 2017 Talenthaus.com was searching for an artist to exhibit in one of the +100 rooms of a 5 floors temporary gallery THE HAUS in the center of Berlin through an international contest on their platform. The aim was to portray the concept of impermanence, in german "Vergänglichkeit", to mirror the history of the gallery itself, born upon what once was a Bank, and destined to be an artistic cradle for just the two months before the building would be torn down to make space for a residential complex.

This underneath was the concept I submitted, titled "PLEASE DO TOUCH", who luckily I had the chance to translate into an installation for the gallery.

here is the link to the brief

https://www.talenthouse.com/i/gestalte-raum-deiner-kunst-art-bang-berlin/submissions

THE CONCEPT

THE CHALLENGE

The whole installation had to be ready in less then three weeks. Which meant that a lot of human sized sculptures had to be ready for that time. More importantly, these sculptures had to be ready to get destroyed.

And I had never done anything like that.

As soon as TALENTHOUSE contacted me to tell me I got selected for the exhibition I started a try and error process to understand which kind of materials would suit my concept. Soon enough I realized that white sand, even the particular one used by sand sculptures, wouldn't fit for heavy, tall human sculptures standing on tiny ankles. So for several days I tried different materials till I got to the best solution I could find in short time, the plaster of Paris.

Obviously I had to work on it with three different densities to get to the final result, and I also asked a friend of mine to assist me in the process of casting my models so that I got in the end five complete sculptures ready for the exhibition.

Here under the pics of the work in progress.

Obviously I had to be the first to try the technique:P

Then each day I'd cast a different model with the help of my assistant.

One of the guys I was casting had a boner in the middle of it. As coincidences are part of the artistic process I obviously decided to keep it that way.

The room before the installation.

And this is the room after the invasion of my sculptures. I still had to finish the work, filling them, giving a last coat of plaster and stabilizing them with a base.

This is how I left the room the day before the exhibition.

THE EXPERIMENT

The day of the opening was pretty interesting to me, not only cause I could observe the reaction of the audience to my installation, but also because I'd get the chance to observe the visitors concretely interact with the sculptures. All the sculptures indeed as a matter of fact, for as tough as they look, were completely destroyable by hands.

In order to invite the visitors of the gallery to the interaction I wrote on the walls of the room a small text paraphrasing a song by Daft Punk and the words of USA current president, highlighting how, as violence is inherent to the human nature, even political speech is nowadays pervaded with it.

So who would touch/scratch/hit the sculptures first? Even more importantly, which sculptures would get the first hit. To give more depth to the experiment not only my sculptures were resembling existing people, but I also asked my models to tell me in which category they feel they fit into, or which ones they feel placed into by society. I asked them their gender, age, sexual orientation, social status, nacionality, job, ethnicity, relationship status, physical shape, all categories in which we or others tend to identify us with, ignoring how the more we try to define ourselves, the more we get apart from our essential core and from each other.

Therefore on the other side of the wall this was the message I left, mixing up all the answers of the human beings represented in my installation, making this way much more difficult, sometimes impossible, to identify the polyamorous one, the german, the gay, the middle class, the black, the queer.

...and here they were, my sculptures, my unidentifiable humans, ready to get in touch with the viewers...

..who, initially reluctant, started sizing them up.

As expected a young man took the initiative first. He walked thought sculpture, after a while he picked the tallest man of the group of sculptures and prepared himself to give the first hit in front of the audience.

This is the instant before..

...this the one after he hit the sculpture with a jab to the jawbone.

Girls around him started laughing while he observed almost scared the result of his choice.

Then he says "ziemlich cool" ("pretty cool").

Here under the video of that moment.

The sculpture looked like it was screaming.

That same young guy will go away just to come back a moment later to finish his work.

In the next hours all the sculptures kept being destroyed, changing time after time, becoming something different, interchanging parts and sharing that same destiny, becoming every time less recognizable as the installation was finding its completion in the visitors allowed violence.

One of the sculptures got literally beheaded.

One man punched one of the female sculptures from side to side.

The sculpture with the erected phallus was the last one standing. His erection though fell to ground pretty quickly leaving him emasculated with his knees bent and the face of one of the female sculptures in place of his own.