Alexandra Coroi lives in Sibiu, and her photo-video works are often accompanied by narrative inlays with nostalgic themes. Concerned with re(attaching) significance to things we usually rush by, she focuses on static scenes, apparently lifeless structures and objects scattered throughout the city and nature, as means of sharing human stories. She walks a lot and says that wandering helps her extract new ideas from everyday life. In 2021 she was part of CoLaboratory, an artistic digital residency where she co-created ”Perpetual Grains” installation.  

Bogdan Dumitrescu graduated from the University of Bucharest, Department of Art History, and since 2013 is part of the art-group dalpofzs. He is interested in the intersection between theory and practice and the way in which we can imagine new methods to express theoretical speculations in reality: through text, video, and sound installations. In this respect, an important line of thought concerns limits, borders, contours, and other differentiating devices that we use to construct (in negative) our world.


Imagined bodies

 

Spinoza’s ethical project urges people to explore what a body can do, and Deleuze’s affective-becomings express ways in which we constantly create new bodies together with other bodies, objects and contexts. Through movement, rhythm, speed, rest and cadence we can explore new becomings. We try this exercise in a flux of body workouts inspired by primal movements.

 

The body is an affective territory in which our individuation is expressed in ways which are unknown to us. But part of this process consists of the active exchange of gazes - my gaze towards the world, the other’s gaze towards me. My body’s limits - or the limits in which I’m confined - are thus outlined by the gazes of others, the otherness, and non-human subjects. How we think this alterity and the stranger’s gaze is a measure of our openness towards our potentiality.

 

A representative space for the anthropological machine, the Zoo is a place of profound sadness in which the wilderness is constrained and tamed for the theatre of our gaze. This space also offers the opportunity to enquire our own gaze, because even though the Zoo exists for our entertainment, here we are also gazed at, we are watched and our scents are being sniffed by tigers, lions and jaguars. Thus we become slightly aware of our vulnerability.

 

The appearance of algorithmic gazes (recognition, object identification and prediction) and the advances of machine learning in recent years shows us something about the preconceived ways in which we construct alterity. The algorithms learn our prejudices but operate under the premise of objectivity, without having a person’s discerning abilities. At the same time, these generative adversarial networks (GANs) can open new lines of flight in our imaginary. By training a GAN with images of our bodies in movement and yoga postures, we explore the idea of potential, imagined and improbable bodies capable of metamorphosis.

---

Exact location: The State Philharmonics Sibiu - (Chimniță)