Marenka Krasomil: In Ralentí: ticking over, you engage directly with car engines and invite performers to create a chorus alongside these machines. What kinds of connections or new relationships do you hope to reveal between technology, gender, and the body through this interaction?
Natalia Domínguez: Car sound design is directly connected with the industrial revolution, where machines became associated with masculinity, and the noise of industry became a symbol of strength, progress, and dominance. The title of the performance, Ralentí: ticking over, refers to the noise of engines when running in neutral, a sound that augurs some performative practices predominantly rooted in the masculine imagination, such as speed races, the tuning culture or the recent rollin’ coal trend, a practice that has primarily become popular among US white men as a form of anti-environmentalism protest, and that consist of the modification of the engine to emit large amounts of black or grey diesel exhaust. In this performance, the performers make use of their voices to compose a sound piece that relates to the mechanisms of car engines, in an attempt to create a new polyphony where human voices rise to challenge the gendered dynamics of technology.
The performance also pays attention to how air acts both as the medium that powers engines and as the vital element shared by all living beings; a bridge between human breath and machine function that emphasises how both rely on interdependent flows.
Marenka Krasomil: Air plays a central role in this project but also in your artistic practice in general. You have worked with air for a long time. How do you see the act of “breathing together” functioning as a form of resistance or transformation in a post-industrial, petro-capitalist context?
Natalia Domínguez: “We are not inhabitants of the earth, but of the atmosphere”, Emanuele Coccia says. But that atmosphere, initially conceived as impalpable and indefinite, is the result of a series of oppressive and extractive conditions that affect our bodies directly. Breathing connects the inside of our bodies with the environment, as well as proposes a collective encounter where all living beings relate through the exchange of oxygen and CO2. To me “breathing together” becomes an everyday yet radically transgressive act that can help us imagine how to generate more empathetic, less extractive, and more regenerative relationships among us and
with the environment.
Marenka Krasomil: What was your relationship to air as a material and concept before developing this project? How has it evolved through your recent work?
Natalia Domínguez: My first approach to air happened while working with “transmutable” materials. At first, I was very interested in “unstable” materialities that need another element to be shaped. From here I developed the series ST (parachute), a group of sculptures that are inspired by aerial protection devices as tools that mediate between our bodies and the atmosphere, as well as some other sculptures that focus on industrial pipes and their consideration of rigid elements that shape gas and air flows. These works helped me discover that some of these materialities were not only complicated to be defined, but also complicated to be seen. Air was one of these materialities. In her book Aeropolis. Queering Air in Toxicpolluted Worlds, Nerea Calvillo draws on the work of feminist philosopher Luce Irigaray to show how air has been systematically rendered invisible within Western thought. As she comments, this invisibility has real, embodied consequences, keeping out of sight the in-betweens, the greys, the fluids, the forgotten. My recent work explores how these invisible narratives around air condition the way we interact with each other and subdue the world we live in, slowly shifting my artistic interest toward the social and political dimensions of air as a shared medium that connects bodies, environments and technologies. Ralentí: ticking over aims to enhance these connections by a collective voice, exploring the materialities of breathing air together to create new discourses.
Marenka Krasomil: In Stuttgart you worked with five performers that engaged with a car on a public plaza. How does the work change from the first part to the second in Barcelona and what did you learn in the process and development?
Natalia Domínguez: As you say, the first part of the performance was, somehow, a five-to-one encounter between the performers and the car. It was challenging and fun to explore how to overcome such a categorical piece of design, especially having in mind that its strong presence and inherent conceptual symbology cannot be avoided. Although we reached very interesting results that helped me understand that the most realistic way to question an object that exceeds your dimensions is collectively, the second part of the performance wants to fade the image of the car slowly away while keeping the core questions of the project. For this reason, the performers will now relate to different parts of cars such as flash lights, exhaust pipes, etc. to examine what kind of sounds and relations can arise when the body is the one who can hold the machine and not otherwise.
Artist Natalia Domínguez works with installation, sculpture, and sound to explore the relationships between subject and object within post-industrial landscapes. Her performance Ralentí: ticking over was commissioned by Driving, Dreaming, Drifting and unfolds in two parts. A first performance was realised in Stuttgart for the festival CURRENT – Art and Urban Space, and a second in Barcelona for
Sant Andreu Contemporani in collaboration with Fabra i Coats - Fàbrica deCreació.
The interview is part of the Driving, Dreaming, Drifting magazine, and can also be found on CURRENTLY the digital magazine of CURRENT Stuttgart.