Las Venus Resort Hotel: Chill Out
Dimensional Fold Download, 2018
installation, found materials; dimensions variable
Las Venus Resort Hotel: Chill Out Dimensional Fold Download is a multi-dimensional science-fiction environment downloaded to earth. The hotel’s owner, Sonja Khalecallon, performs femininity to the point of short-circuit, breakage, and collapse in dystopian durational performances. Years into the future, Earth’s orbital path has set it on a collision path with another planet, prompting the wealthy to leave Earth in search of new planets to colonise. Minorities and people from the lower classes are left behind on the ecologically deteriorating planet. With no option to escape, Khalecallon uses her feminine mystique to build up a hotel empire. Doing anything she can to keep herself afloat with limited resources, she builds the hotel in order to survive. The hostess embodies the ‘feminine’ trait of multitasking by offering herself as cook, cleaner, aestheticist, entertainer, and manager. Viewers become guests in her mystical empire and the site becomes a destination within the exhibition itself. The installation is composed of the post-apocalyptic plastic waste of all things non-biodegradable, evincing a retro-futuristic flare and referencing classist aesthetics by representing the opposite of what can be considered ‘refined’ taste. The installation critiques notions of imposed reality (including Judith Butler’s performativity of gender) and speaks to urgent issues in gentrification and ecology as well as to the zones of resistance that emerge in pre-gentrified minority communities.
Sibelje has a conceptual and interdisciplinary practice that takes place in an expanded field and includes thought production, performance, sound art, video, painting, sculpture, and installation. They are currently operating daily through social media stories, under the handle @aevtarperform, researching intrapolitics (political acts within the self) and devising nanopolitics (collective processes of becoming and care) through a process of deprogramming the self — tackling the societal malware of ID definitions as they are defined by the social matrix. Their work addresses the deconstruction and formation of identities, as well as that which exists between our ‘real’ selves and their outward presentations as we interact, each of us in our individual complexity, morphing fluidly with each other and our surroundings. Non-binary thinking and non-binary feminism break down the polarisations imposed on bodies within society — the socially-coded software downloaded into our hardware. Using technology as a metaphor, the body becomes a vehicle for receiving and emitting digitally coded signals, which are expressed as visual and performative acts in our daily experience.
#intrapolitics #nanopolitcs #radicalempathy
Artist’s website: cibelle.tumblr.com