Installation, 7 min video-art, sculpture

«How can you describe the weirdness that is not assembled enough?» — interdisciplinary project, which draws on the study of magic, of oriental religions, and of technologies to reconsider the realm of the sensorial. Skidan’s project ponders the interrelations between changing technologies and corporality as well as their consequences: the instability of the body, the erasure of the notion of a ‘norm’, the dilution of identity, the alienation of the virtual body – the avatar – from its physical counterpart.

The video centres on the multiplying avatars of a cybershaman, whose body is used as a form of incantation. The succession of avatars seeks to somehow capture the instability of ‘reality’, as do the flitting movements between a real, natural landscape and a constructed, imaginary meta-landscape of impossible worlds. The video lends both landscape and body an almost sculptural quality, and brings out their equality as actors. Gradually, the cybershaman’s movement patterns change; the human body adapts to its environment — one that is both natural and constructed. An emerging, hybrid identity arises from Skidan’s attempt to capture the elusive sensation of postcontemporaneity.

The heroine’s body either grows out of the landscape, or merges with it. Her body is constantly changing and mutating, gathering in new configurations, her identity is also difficult to grasp — she disintegrates and slips away. Only some elements return the viewers to the current moment of time, referring to the realness of this heroine. Otherwise, it is a virtual body, of numerous, imaginary, and unstable avatars, rather than a real person.
The landscape, at first glance, is ideal, but it is imbued with a sense of weirdness — what we might call “pristine” is also mutating and changing, demanding new approaches and communication tools.
Natural and man-made elements merge into a sculpture, becoming almost indistinguishable, heightening the question of the possibility of nature as such. The audio track — music and monotonous intermittent speech — creates a pulsating rhythm which immerses you into a meditative state, and reminds of non-verbal methods of communication, trance and rituals as ways of interacting with phenomena which transcend boundaries of the human.

In the first part of her project «How can you describe the weirdness that is not assembled enough?», Sofa Skidan explores the mutual mutations and interweaving of the body, technology and what we used to call nature.