ISADORA CANELA
| contemporary art | storytelling | community building
TABULA RASA
Video-art, 5'40" 2022
Where I come from there is no name, there are no clothes, there is no nation. Whilst colonizing the self, life fits in a square and sells pain as fulfilling. I run away rapidly inwards and here I am, facing a sparkling pink sky, where you also come from, but have no memory of.
This piece is a trail through senses, in search for the self. I bare myself nude and invite you to drift to intimacy. If nothing is solid, why should I be? Everything flows, your insides too, so let us rethink where we come from, and free ourselves.
In this immersive and sensorial video piece, an internal organ is seen close-up and personal, transitioning from abject to beautiful. The original orchestral soundtrack flows along with the abstract and the visceral, in perfect intimate harmony. At the end comes the colour red, to turn everything inside out. Without knowing my face, you should know we are neighbours, sharing the liquids of life and death in our bodies, our only home.
part of the exhibition:
The exhibition Across Borders: Body & Self is a collaboration between Counterpoints Arts and coculture Berlin inspired by Mojisola Adebayo’s Leaves from Family Tree commissioned by Counterpoints Arts and performed in the summer of 2021 at ZK/U Berlin.
The six artists were selected from an open call to submit existing work that explores the themes of body & self in the context of migration and displacement.
Mojisola’s performance explored environmental justice and migration via the incredible story of Henrietta Lacks, an African American tobacco farmer descended from enslaved people. Henrietta had her body cells taken without her knowledge for medical research and seventy years later, even after her death, they are still multiplying and continue to be used in laboratories all over the world, without her permission. Millions of us benefit from it today, even though most of us have never heard her name. By talking about her story today, we place her body and her(self) on the map of contemporary Berlin.
Using a variety of media the artists in this exhibition add their own personal and political discursive angles – be it feminist, migrant, queer or medical – to the exploration of memory and identity in the context of the body & self. Whether this happens via a relationship between the body and an object, by turning toward our inner skins and senses, by connecting historical events across the 20th and 21st centuries using the body, by testing the limits of their own bodies through durational rituals or repetitive habitual acts – they ask us to question the logic of the subjectivity and materiality of crossing borders.
1 - 5 SEP 2021
VARIOUS TIMES
COCULTURE, BÖTTGERSTRASSE 16, 13357 BERLIN
Artist's steatment
Exhibition's release