Feeding Alice, 2003-2007

Feeding alice explores our relationship to what we depend on, the things we need, desire and consume. Taking, exchanging, filling up, yielding to the outside, and violating rules in order to achieve something essential. Or is it a not so essential – fabricated, imposed necessity? The reactions to the drive and fulfillment of that necessity, from pleasure and gratitude to guilt and fear are what I try to grasp; their shape and a precise physical expression; the instant relationships created between flesh and objects, power and yielding, the way things invade other things.

My approach to this subject is through non-realistic, somehow absurd scenes staged in a very realistic way, exaggerated by the sharpness of detail of the holograms. The unnatural is supported by the completely reliable volumes and gestures which appear behind the glass, the scenes we see could be drown out from an everyday situation, but there is always an element which destroys this possibility.

In a black space, the floor covered by green grass, there are three holograms–windows–showing us alice in three different acts of feeding herself:

• while she sleeps, alice has a transfusion from the TV
• alice drinks directly from the earth
• somebody else plugs alice into the electric outlet.

The holograms produce a little shock with their extreme realism: the person from the image is there, packed in an unexpectedly deep space which appears from the bi-dimensional. Appears with all the details and when we move, we discover more details behind, on the sides above and underneath.

It is a world where everything is strangely similar to ours, where people are frozen in an almost verosimile way and the actions look totally natural, but they are not.

Grass, with its specific tissue, builds another part of this small world. Involving the senses of touch and smell at the periphery of the visual experience, the illusion of extreme-reality and strangeness grows bigger.