© 2023 Dora Perini. All right are reserved.
FAT LADY ARCIPELAGO
Installation view
Fuori Biennale, Venice 2022
This work is an assemblage of elements gathered and made at different stages of my evolving practice. The metal structure comes from Organi Interni; it functions as a skeleton and catalyzer of the wound-fat lady-portal. A metal meta bone-door vessel, evoking the fat lady and drawing the perimeter to the opening of her magic portals. The production was like assembling the opposite of an armor, a parallel: extreme openness instead of a sealed protective shield.
In this Fat Lady episode, she is in the send and the soil and the plants, specifically chosen for their healing powers. She is growing through the structure, evading it, contaminating surroundings suddenly. The installation was exhibited at the Laguna Festival of Venice, an off Biennale event, where the audience was invited to engage with the work by entering its space, mindful of their traces on the send and, therefore the alteration of the inner environment -self through it.
The eggs, a symbol of fertility but also of the potential intersection between life and death, are also in this installation quail eggs, because of their smaller appearance, their whispering presence, but mostly because of their black figurative spots, a variety of symbolic dark markings, maps of imagined wounds.
The plants grow out of the soil into different positions, some together, some alone, some the same, some different. They recreate the arcipelago in the way an astrological constellation would spread through space.
R U a sick shitting puppy 2?
2022, installation
MAGIC MELE
2021
Installation and performance
Magic Mele is an assembled installation with painting, moving image, and sculpture. In the first diptych (following pages), I want to highlight how the initial single canvas, in which I find a dialogue with my Goddess-Fat Lady-Monstress, is later cut and used as conventional tissue topping for my homemade ‘magic jam.’ This resonates with the aspect of cutting in a generative sense, a theme that I research and invest in my practice.
A written side note invites the audience to take one jar for each household, which evolves into the painting being physically spread through space. For the Goddess to be whole again would imply for the people to come together, referencing other theologies.
The painting then sits on top of 300 jars of Magic Jam I’ve made in my home with the help of loved ones.
I have recorded myself in a ritual in which I evoke the Goddess within my primary ingredients for the jam-making: apples, beetroot powder, sugar and lavender. I draw a circle of apples and candles around me at sunset and chant and walk in circles, putting the intention of healing and gathering into the organic spread. The jam becomes the ultimate viscera of the Goddess, for people to take home and feed on.
ROSEMARY
2022, Installation
Central Saint Martin Open studio
In this work, I lay points of a constellation that recreate a plate, or a gathering of plates, or a meal within the meal within a magic reconfigured domestic wanna-be circle! Layers of surrealist narratives spiral subliminally out of the plate into the spatial plate-circle: recreating the space for me to physically engage, perform, the violent search for ideal goodness, supposed healing.
Enforcing healing as if healing could be consumed, outlining the issues that build in and out of relationships to the body, food, and the trauma that is often cast between the two.
I hide the performance in plain sight just like all food disorders operate in the home and through affections, in the small liminal contradiction between the familiar gathering ritual and lonely habits, between conscious and unconscious, between the learned, the inherited and the secretive.
The audience only has access to the binge in the intimacy of a hypothetically soil-charged iPhone screen. The origin of the rosemary’s powerful healing properties, at the roots, is devoured in search of well-being and spit out in apparent reknown impossibility.
THE HOLY TETTA
2022, Installation
Final Degree Show, Central Saint Martin
The Holy Tetta is a playground. A generous sacred space made for the collective to gather on and around. It is a sculptural environment built to serve a new speculative ecology of wellness.
This assemblage of gestures points towards community: a magical cacao milk feast and a casual, open invitation to become part of the work.
The audience becomes both the feeder and fed, enabling a new trust system while embracing the occult, the unseen alchemy. This immersive piece allows for a new form of audience engagement, lead by the audience and its interest in investing in the unknown, mirroring aspects of installed social dynamics. Will we contribute to the feeding? Will we accept anonymously made fluids to enter our organism? Will we want to become part of those charging the fluid with their supposed energy?
Comfortable outfits resembling potential magical ingredients are worn through the meditation, at the top of the Tetta platform (Tetta in italian means breast), together with bizarre antennas: speculating playfully on the reception of some higher vibrations that enable ‘energy’, in all of its shades, to flow through the bodies of the participants and the Holy Tetta, into the collective-sensitive potion.
UNTITLED HEAVY
2019, England
Assemblage found objects, cement breezeblocks, used leather sofa
165 w x 86 h x 80 deep
I link this project and the next one, Us Plants, together because of their symptom and cure relation. In the assembled sculpture Untitled Heavy (2019) I seek to recreate that suspended space in time in which I’ve often seen myself and my loved ones in. It is a state of numbness and depression, alienation from reality either sought or succumbed to, where we search for shelter in the comfort of a domestic softness, but end up still paralyzed and unnurtured.
Mental health issues are finally somewhat being recognized and legitimized in our society, sometimes in the less generative way, in which diagnosis become identities. I believe, having been through it personally, that relief does come from diagnosis but also doesn’t always help the subject break out of the box that same diagnosis creates. This takes us back to a paralyzation that flourishes especially in the ambiguity and overly vertical system that is contemporary western medicine. I make this work in research of allowing that painful stagnant state to emerge.
Consequently, I give a response to this sculpture in a second time, investigating ways to address healing in a non-binary matter.
