ARTIST´S STATEMENT
Traveling around the world I have come to realize that we are living in a world that overflows with waste.
This was the starting point that led me to investigate the relationship between discarded materials, such as plastic bags, and the environment.
In the past years I have been looking at how rubbish and man made objects are very much transforming and creating new landscapes and becoming more and more integrated into nature.
This process, which I name “the evolution of landscape”, and that is generated by our modern lifestyle, (consumption), I find very interesting to observe, because it makes it, from an artistic point of view, a very exciting material to work with and exploit.
After working for years with all sorts of discarded materials, waste and rubbish, I decided that for the time being I would focus on working just with plastic bags.
I think that plastic bags epitomize the perfect and quintessential discarded object.
To me the plastic bag is the symbolic embryo that contains our lifestyle and is the vessel that carries it out in its journey.
I find plastic bags interesting because of their remarkable contradictory qualities. Plastic bags are in fact both worthless and useful, disposable and recyclable, flimsy and strong, ephemeral and eternal, but above all they are universal.
By putting the plastic bag in an artistic context I would like to elevate it to another dimension that takes it away from the idea of the banal and obvious and for an instant transforms it into a poetic object. In other words it becomes an inspiring muse. A mass-produced muse with forms, lines and color, that can’t help but interact with the surrounding environment.
Like in my performances the plastic bags are a human and therefore natural appendix of man. Because one could argue that whatever is man made is natural and that ultimately nature is an unstable and unreliable human construction ruled by social and cultural needs.
I have chosen to materialize my ideas trough the form of installation because in this way I find that I can better express the concept of environment, space, time and duration. I like my installation to be large and give a sense of multitude and mass as in mass-production, to be invasive by taking over space to the point of suffocation, and to be in constant evolution and therefore changeable.
I want my work to become a virtual lyrical extension of modern life that substitutes the old idealized concept of nature with a romanticized modern one.
Despite the fact that my works wants to underline the relationship, or the conflict, between culture and nature, and how they both influence and reflect each other, I also want to build an awareness and make a comment on the way we are living and how it effects the environment.
Nevertheless it is a non-judgmental comment since I haven’t really resolved for myself, and never will, its contradictory nature of beauty and danger.