ANA DE ALMEIDA
“Ficou
a ver
passar
navios.”
#ARTS-BASED RESEARCH #ARCHITECTURE #COMMONS #INSTALLATION #SPACE #MULTIMEDIA #IDENTITY #PERFORMANCE
#NEO-COLONIAL #VIDEO #GENDER
BIO. Ana de Almeida (b.1987) is an artist and author from Lisbon, currently based in Vienna. She is a member of the artists’
collective dienstag abendof
of VBKÖ and of the Interndinner collective against precarization of work in the cultural field. Her artistic practice addresses memory and remembering processes, narrative constructions that connect space and subject, and plurispatial and multilayered narratives in general.
Ana de Almeida is currently a Ph.D. candidate at the Academy of Fine Arts of Vienna, pursuing a doctoral thesis about the production of images in the 1974—1989 inter-revolutionary space between the Carnation and the Velvet Revolutions.
Ana de Almeida is currently a Ph.D. candidate at the Academy of Fine Arts of Vienna, pursuing a doctoral thesis about the production of images in the 1974—1989 inter-revolutionary space between the Carnation and the Velvet Revolutions.
Ana de Almeida, Alicja Rogalskaand & Vanja Smiljanic
NOVA. Future thoughts on surviving together (2020 AT)
Live Action Role Play
In the future, gender inequality was erased. Nova is a multitude of newly born, radically inclusive and self-managed communities. Heterogeneous in their forms of commoning and social organization, Nova share a vow to never let oppression in any form rise again. Nova. Future thoughts on surviving together is a feminist futurist LARP - Live Action Role Play by Ana de Almeida, Alicja Rogalska and Vanja Smiljanić; directed towards feminist and queer-feminist activists based in Vienna. NOVA is a day of speculative gaming aimed at sharing survival strategies, exercising solidarity and intersectionality, creating solidarity networks and forming new alliances between different emancipatory movements. Together, we created a piece of feminist political fiction - a work in progress and a world free of patriarchal oppression in the making.
With: VBKÖ, Saloon Wien, Kunst & Kind, Latinxs Unidxs, Kültür Gemma, Cine Collective, Mala Sirena, female:pressure.
A Casa / The House The flat / Die Fläche (2018 PT)
MDF, stucco-lustro, stereo sound 42'5'' looped
Likewise a sculpture, A Casa (The House) shares the aesthetic and architectonic language of the House Wittgenstein in Vienna. The two volumes are a transposition and folding down of two of its architectonic elements: a window and the vestibule door. They serve as display for documental material such as letters and photos and incorporate an audio piece with interviews led by the artist. The surface is covered by stucco-lustro, a coating technique proliferating in Vienna on the turn to the 20th century, similar to how could the original coating of the walls of the House Wittgenstein have looked like before they were painted white after World War II. The highlighting of the stucco-lustro architectonic detail points out to a fundamental discovery for the understanding of the house as aesthetic experiment in which the house interiors, composed by materials which evoke extreme hardness, seem to dematerialize through the highly reflecting properties of the stucco walls.
Photos: © Ana de Almeida & Stephanie Misa
Untitled (Yellow) (2017 PT)
Wall, yellow paint, memorabilia, diashow, stereo sound
A cooperation between Ana de Almeida (PT/AT) and Stephanie Misa (PH/AT) . This is a project about landscape as formal and informal disposition of elements. Coordinates. An arrangement, a hierarchy: borders and de-limitations, transpositions and transgressions, frames and their inside-outside, margins, and of course landscape — of the geographical, political, personal, and emotional nature. Edouard Glissant’s Traité du Tout-Monde. (Poétique IV), calls it archipelagic thinking, a group of islands that lends its topography to an alternative imaginary: a reassessment of the insularity of bound cultures, of nation-states, and the heaviness of “continental thought”. The archipelago is an alternative imaginary, one that posits that identity could be as a conglomeration of islands (composed of many, yet is one). Identity formation, embodiment, complex colonial histories, evolution, interconnectedness, diaspora and change — Oh to dispell the oppressive idea of nationalistic wholeness!
MARTINA MENEGON
“The
awareness
of the self
is most significantly
activated at the moments of disturbance of balance, in situations of perplexity and
disorientation”
– Ksenia Fedorova
#AUGMENTED REALITY #BODY #DIGITAL #INSTALLATION #INTERACTIVE
#PHOTOGRAPHY #VIDEO #VIRTUAL REALITY #EXISTENTIAL
BIO. Martina Menegon (Italy, 1988) is an artist working with Interactive and Extended Reality Art. In her works, Martina creates intimate and complex assemblages of physical and virtual elements that explore the contemporary self and its synthetic corporeality. She experiments with the uncanny and the grotesque, the self and the body and the dialogue between the physical and the virtual realities, to create disorienting experiences that become perceivable despite their virtual nature. Martina is an University Assistant and Lecturer at the department of Transmedia Art at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, where she teaches “Digital Design and Virtuality”. She is also teaching multimedia tools for interactive arts at the IUAV University in Venice (MA Digital Exhibit, BA Multimedia Arts) together with Klaus Obermaier and Stefano D’Alessio. She is currently Head of Extended Reality and Curator at the “Area for Virtual Art” a platform for immersive experiences and get-togethers. She is also part of the curatorial team of the new media art festival of Vienna “CIVA Festival.
Martina Menegon currently lives and works in Vienna, Austria.
When you are close to me i shiver (2020)
Live Simulation / Installation
5 tablets, HD Display, Gaming PC
video, sound, indefinite duration
Sound design: Alexander Martinz
“When you are close to me I shiver” is an algorithmically controlled live simulation, a real-time generated virtual reality that takes place in a version of the future in which humans, out of desperation, gather in masses on the last remaining piece of land. Inspired by the walrus scene in the documentary “Our Planet” narrated by David Attenborough and produced by Silverback Films, the project proposes an intense scenario encompassing our environmental and personal crises. It reflects on how we identify and connect ourselves in different realities while addressing the human condition in a world in ecological and therefore social crisis. On the tablets, virtual cameras scan the environment from various point of views, like surveillance drones. On the main screen, a similar camera randomly targets and focuses on different situations while a familiar voice-over narrates the tragic story. The grotesque low-poly clones of the artist’s 3D scanned body (per)form the population of the island. Through these perceivable avatars, the artist creates a new identity that arises out of plurality, proprioceptively renegotiating the fragility of both the physical and the virtual self and its realities. The dystopian imagery of “when you are close to me I shiver” reveals a seemingly surreal scene that is all too real after all.
Image: © Martina Menegon
Virtual Narcissism (2016)
Virtual sculpture, live simulation, video, sound, indefinite duration
"Virtual Narcissism" is a series of virtual performative sculptures that show the untouched results of the artist’s body that has, over the past years, been obsessively 3D scanned. The artistic process challenges 3D scanning technique by self-scanning and remaining still simultaneously without loss of body datas in the final 3D model. The work reflects on the translation of the body into a virtual state, it creates a grotesque dialogue between the physical and the digital.
All alone, together (2020)
Live Simulation / WebVR, installation, video, sound, indefinite duration
2 HD displays, gaming pc
Sound design: Alexander Martinz
“All alone, together” brings two realities, the physical and the virtual, together. In the Schauraum, a video installation shows virtual clones of the artist’s 3D-scanned body, constrained in a dense formation resulting from an algorithmical anomaly. Their perpetual torture constantly shifts between ecstasy and anxiety. As an addition, these bodies face a similar fate in a virtual space (Mozilla Hubs), yet there they can be experienced beyond physical limitations. Since the existence of the cyberspace, there is an obsession with the redefinition of the self as well as an anxiety about body and identity boundaries. We are facing a new experience of corporeality and subjectivity, a new artificial flesh and materiality. Through these perceivable avatars, the artist proprioceptively renegotiates the fragility of both the physical and the virtual bodies and selves, reflecting on today’s situation in which we might fell all alone, together.
