Neofuturist
statement: Are avant-garde practices still important to you?
Avant-garde practices are critical to my work. I have always experienced avant-garde as fresh air, a driving, diversified force towards a better future. Life is certainly more fulfilling to me through experimentations, a type of refusal to just accept the norm. Instead, I prefer to creatively develop from what we have, create synergies where possible, and also criticize and abandon what we do not really need, so that we can radically transform everyday life. Through my multidisciplinary practice based in London, working in poetry, performance, installation and regeneration, I create experiences, objects and environments of mutating futures. I am particularly interested in the ways and possibilities (existing or imaginative), where technological advances, environmental management and human rights create, or restrict, a balance of co-existence. I explore future as a spectrum – it’s upon the direction and actions of all society forces to decide how utopian, dystopian, or anything in between, that future could be.
In my work I often blend texts (lyrics and narratives) with visual arts, as well as cartography, geography, sounds, and linguistic and morphological experimentations. That blend creates the matter and spirit of my practice. Performance Art, Futurism, Fluxus, Land Art, Surrealism, Dadaism, Lettrism, Conceptual Art, Live Art and New Media Art, are all among the innovative art movements and practices I feel I have been in a fruitful dialogue for years. Of course innovations can occasionally be disturbing, as they come with risks and especially the one of failing while exploring the unknown – but mistakes and difficulties are also great learning opportunities. I am looking forward to the future and all the new ideas and challenges it will bring.
project description:
I made DNA combining words, numbers and shapes, coding a hedonist desire of the future, through sole use of Microsoft Word. DNA works as a linguistic roadmap where an invitation to interactively ‘insert’ your own existence is coded in numbers and then in shapes. First, each of the twenty-six letters of the English alphabet is linked to numbers, for example ‘a’ is coded as ‘1’, ‘b’ as ‘2’, etc. Then, as the roadmap continues, the same invitation is coded as mountainous surfaces, where each word is mapped in height relative to the coded numbers.
The mapping process carries on as words of encouragement are projected in 2-D. Exploring our ongoing way to the future through the power of words, every individual’s necessity and ability to desire plays a role in the creation of our common human DNA.