Evelina Rajca : Recent Works
Evelina Rajca's practice is based in between intuitive embodied knowledge and systems that construct processes of documenting these experiences, translating them into interventions, objects, maps and scores. She uses old and new technologies as working materials in an ever-changing process. Her performative explorations in the form of collaborations, sculptures and interventions in public space stimulate the question of who inhabits that space under constant transformation. In her colloquium she will present a selection of her practice based artistic research.
Full abstract:
“Anästhetiker” – is a neologism coined from “aesthete” and “anaesthetic” and it is the title of one of Evelina Rajca's works exhibited at the Ernst Schering Foundation in Berlin in combination with the Dry Ice Symphony for Urban landscapes. Carbon dioxide is an important element in this work's concept – Co2 has, depending on its density, different effects: analgesia – anaesthesia – death. Since the density and aggregate state of a substance determines its level of toxicity, keywords and ideas such as the state of consciousness and irreversibility are vital in Rajca's artistic research. Her main questions are based on the structure of time, according to the idea of diffraction and concentration, as well as the issue of enhancement strategies - thus 'vita activa'.
The hypothesis that the motivation to act is carried out by reward systems and that these systems rely (like almost every system of mammals) on sleep is as important for her field studies as the assumption that collective imaginations, dreams, values and fears, as more or less socially unredeemed, are enrolled as forceful imaginary reality in public and private spaces and what is left over of a reformulation of nature. Sleep can be understood as a continual offence or even defence to capitalism, the notion of round-the-clock consumption and production in contemporary society. In her Phd, Rajca examines the process of encroachment on sleep, - in addition to the manipulation of it, referring to possibilities and strategies for its enhancement (i.e. acoustic stimuli of the brain during sleep) or even its substitute, - not only because it represents one of the last remaining fields of dissidence, of 'anti-productivity' and even of privacy.
Her practice is based in between intuitive embodied knowledge and different systems that construct processes of documenting these experiences and translating them into interventions, objects, maps, scores. She re-use, for example, sounds and old and new technologies as new working material in an ever-changing process. Her performative explorations, in form of collaborations, sculptures, interventions, in public space are wholly present in the space, stimulating the question of who inhabits it. Yet in the process of play and exploration, they continue and transform. In her colloquium she will present a selction of her practice based artistic research.
Evelina Rajca's work was recently awarded with the Giga-Hertz Encouragement Prize for Sound Art from the ZKM ( Center for Art and Media ) in Karlsruhe, an artistic research grant from Stroom, The Netherlands and the PhD grant of the Germany Academic Exchange Service.