Daria Martin

São Francisco, 1973. Lives in Londres

Daria Martin’s oneiric, synesthetic videos take bodily sensations and unconscious perceptions and make them almost palpable. Working with choreographers, musicians and actors, the artist pinpoints convergences and continuities between distinct artistic disciplines and invites different perceptions of what it means to be the spectator. Shooting on 16 mm film, his works often evoke the Utopian ideas and aesthetics of the modernist vanguards. The artificiality and theatricality of the situations he stages, however, induce reflections on film as a potential purveyor of fantasies, dreams and illusions.

In In the Palace, the 1932 Alberto Giacometti sculpture Le Palais à 4 heures du matin [The Palace at Four in the Morning] is reconstructed on human scale as a real stage for choreographies inspired by the history of modern dance, from the Ballets Russes and Oskar Schlemmer to the Martha Graham dance company. The bodies seem motionless before the structure, while the camera confers the continuous traveling motion of film. The scene’s rigid geometry, the raw lighting against a dark backdrop, and the rainfall and birdsong soundtrack lend the scene a grave, dramatic aspect that clashes with the brief interludes in which the ballerinas, dressed in apparently amateur costumes, break their pose. The experience of these performers seems to be in suspended animation: their bodies are trapped in a hypnotic, imaginary space like the turning cogs in some strange music box.