Nona Inescu: Vestigial Structures
Date:
Mon, 09/28/2020 - 3:00pm - Sun, 10/25/2020 - 11:55pm
Location:
Online
Event Type:
Other CCRMA WAVE (Wall for AudioVisual Expression) presents Vestigial Structures (2018) by Nona Inescu.
September 28 – October 25
Single-channel HD video | 6′36″
Sound by Simina Oprescu
With the participation of Andrada Besliu
Camera: Tania Cucoreanu, Nona Inescu, Vlad Nanca
Text based on an extract from “A Land” by Jacquetta Hawkes
Produced with the support of Frac des Pays de la Loire
The video Vestigial Structures takes its starting point from the concretions that are still considered to be a mystery of nature, a geological curiosity, due to their unusual shapes, textures, sizes, and resemblance to human manufactured objects or fossils. These stones accumulated in time layers after layers of sedimentary minerals of different kinds, turning them into solid “portraits” of the natural changes occurring during hundreds of years sometimes. In the video, the stones found by Nona in Romania appear to be attached to a human body, which not only accepts this proximity but searches for a common “ground”. In addition to the body “exercises” using the stones as nodular patches attached to one’s skin, Nona juxtaposes images filmed in black and white at the Carnac alignments in Brittany during her residency at Frac des Pays de la Loire. The Carnac stones cover more than 4 km of nearly 3 thousand of menhirs – peulvens, as they were called during Hugo’s and Stendhal’s time – dating back to the Neolithic period. Placed in rows, the Carnac stones were the subject of many disputed theories and traditional myths regarding their origin – from a hypothesis that they were erected by giants, to a belief that they are pagan soldiers turned to stone by Pope Cornelius, to a more recent theory on their astronomical alignment, as well as their architectural purpose. “When one looks at them steadily they seem to move, to bend, to become infused by life”, Guy de Maupassant stated. Identified with human beings, the menhirs were described by Jacquetta Hawkes in her book A Land, first published in 1951, as follows: “In all these legends human beings have seen themselves melting back into rock, in their imaginations must have pictured the body, limbs, and hair melting into smoke and solidifying into these blocks of sandstone, limestone and granite.” Quotes from this remarkable book are used by Nona as a reference to the personal and visionary ideas of Hawkes on the individual as being dispersed into the whole history of humanity – “every being is united both inwardly and outwardly with the beginning of life in time and with the simplest forms of contemporary life”. In connection to this particular research, Nona Inescu presents an uncanny object titled Appendix, referencing the vestige organs, remnants from our evolutionary past.
—Diana Marincu
Nona Inescu lives and works in Bucharest, Romania. She completed her studies in the summer of 2016 at the National University of Arts in Bucharest (Photography and Video Department) after studying at the Chelsea College of Art & Design in London (2009-2010) and at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp (2010-2011). Her art practice is interdisciplinary and encompasses photographs, objects, installations and sometimes video works. Informed by theoretical and literary research, her works are centered on the relationship between the human body and the environment and the redefinition of the subject in a post-humanist key. Lately, she has been exploring the human interaction with natural and prehistoric elements.
Simina Oprescu is a sound, video and mixed-media artist living in Bucharest with a full attention on sound and composition for the past 4 years. In 2015 she graduated from the Department of Photography and Dynamic Imagery at the National Art University in Bucharest and in the period 2017-2018 she did one year in the acousmatic composition department of the Royal Conservatory in Mons, Belgium. The artist focuses on several concepts, starting with the analysis of how the fixed image and the moving image are mutually reinforcing*, being interested in how the depth of the background can be used as a tool for remodelling our perception of the environment and the movement; to the use of sound as a way of expression, with or without an image as a constitutional environment.(*Like sound and silence). Using different instruments, ‘sound objects’ and digital programs, into her compositions, the artist uses sound as an experiment and as a deep understanding of the self and the surroundings. Also interested in the possibilities of integrating sound (and rhythm**) into visual environments (internally*** or externally), and the ability of the sound to radically change the understanding of the image: “In the Beginning was the Sound compared after Image….” ***thoughts, fears, moods, synesthesia.
FREE
Open to the Public