Death comes repeatedly
2023
Skeleton of a vibrator, led spotlight, color filter, electrical wires and connectors
Dimensions adaptable to space
The statute of the contemporary individual can be traced within those relationships born thanks to
the so-called new media whose consequence is the radical change in the relationship between
the Single and the Other, which has led to a gradual depersonalization.
The individual is asked to be increasingly active, to get involved by showing all the background of
his own existence, so quickly as to translate the movements into an increasingly mechanical
action.
Death comes repeatedly is a moment in perpetual movement, an intimate and private
performance that oscillates between absence and presence, between reality and transcendence.
The work investigates the conditioned mechanical nature of pleasure and the empty repetition of
relational dynamics, reducing the forms and arriving at their death; in this way, the last spasm
between life and death, the intermittent wink of the vibration, allows us to perceive the body, the
relationship with oneself and with the Other, in a polysemantic way based on the different gazes
that rest on it.
This investigation into carnality, overwhelming and fast, translates into the installation through a
playful and colorful language, which helps to create an atmosphere that is both grotesque and
captivating, of which the only audible sound in the space is the ambassador: the mechanical
vibration of pleasure.
The stable point of the work is a circle of pink light, a transcendental symbol of being, which
encompasses the viewer's gaze and welcomes it gently.
The installation, which refers to the shape of a lollipop, is in continuous movement, shaken by the
repeated spasms of the skeleton of a vibrator hanging in the center, devoid of its soft external
casing. Once the mechanism has been revealed, the skeleton is the only physical element, the
only tangible reference that escapes in movement.
Death comes repeatedly causes desire and then flees into the void.
A search for desire that turns out to be infinite, a race enclosed in an artificial loop in which
waiting turns into a sweet agony, not exhaustive but open to movement, open in the light to
possible rebirths.
It is not known when and if the desire will be achieved. Despite this, the movement of the body,
which has become a machine, continues.
Martina Pappalardo
Visual documentation
https://youtu.be/ER8gGHPpFuk
Site-specific installation set up at Officine Brandimarte, Ascoli Piceno (AP)
curated by Rosanna Accordino