Share Prize interview: Sonia Cillari

October 21, 2010 8:30 am

Sonia Cillari has been selected for the Share Prize 2010 exhibition, that wil be presented from the 2nd until the 7th of November at the Regional Museum of Natural Science of Turin.

– As an artist, I need to rest connects a digital creature that you have called Feather with your body and your breath. What relationship has emerged between your physical body, made up of atoms, and the immaterial creature that lives in symbiosis with you during your performances?
As an artist, I need to rest” is a very intimate and draining work, in which I try to emphasis the creation in itself of the digital creature before an audience, and over time. As the artist, I control both the creation and life of the creature through my ‘conscious’ breathing. This is why I need to be in a particular mental and physical state to be able to build a symbiotic tie between myself and the creature, and hence to ‘perform’’ at my best. I need to be totally ‘relaxed’ during the performance so as to avoid the risk of hyperventilating, which would mean having to breathe much deeper and faster to be able to control what my creature does. At a certain point though, the creature takes on a life of her own and begins to resist me, which makes it much more difficult for me to ‘deliver’ the creature to the audience.
In this work, breathing is what lets us keep each other alive – the creature needs me to exist, and I need to create her to be an artist. It is a metaphor for the interdependence of the artist and the art work. The connection with my breathing highlights how creation is a carnal act of life, and how our vital instinct can lead an artist into a constant state of excitement and frustration.

– What do you think of the intimacy of our own media world? For instance, have social networks changed our feelings about intimacy, as they have with privacy?
Intimacy has a rather twisted meaning, because it concerns and grows with human ‘relationships’. In the media it is just ‘hollow’.

– The work lives and grows through very fluid, slow movements. What do you think about slowness?
This work builds on the idea of a performance over time, as concerns both me and the audience. As the artist, my intention is to ‘slowly’ reach a state where I can push my body and my mind over the limit, because I see performance as a very important tool in artistic exploration. For the audience, I want to put them in the voyeuristic position of being able to take their time (or come back at different times) to view the work, bringing them along with me in my slowly growing state…
We need to expand our experience of spatial sensibility. Becoming conscious of our reality is a process that only becomes ‘real’ once we acquire information through our senses – this is why new spatial approaches need to emerge, complex, dynamic levels of physical interaction with the environment.