THE ECHO OF THE VOID

Architectures of confinement are imposing and suffocating, they prevent those who are subjected to their immanence from living with ease and often even in a dignified way. Stemming from a series of works created during the last year, my most recent textile-based performance, documented photographically and through video, The Echo of the Void, portrays the growing mass of an apparently innocuous, soft whiteness, which becomes obsessive, and physically oppressive, in relation with the human body.

The interaction and the tension between the two components – the human body disappearing under the textile, which is the result of the human very action – can be read from multiple perspectives: the unresolved interaction and tension between the human body and an abused, reactive nature; the outrageous treatment imposed under carceral rules by oppressive judicial and legal/ised systems; the global experience of confinement within the limited perimeter of our domesticities.

The knitted piece references in its dimensions (2 x 2 m) the size of the smallest prison cell, as per human rights activists’ records, thus highlighting the inhumane condition of this space of confinement, where notions of punishment are associated with humiliation and diminishment.

At the core of the work lies the relation with the space, which inevitably becomes an interlocutor: the space can be haunting at times, and at times it can be comforting, almost protective. As an act of empowerment, the attempt to overgrow the architecture of confinement becomes an extreme acknowledgment of the potential of the bare corporeal dimension in the face of challenges of either political, environmental or social nature, and ultimately brings the human body to the centre of the investigation.

Cristiana de Marchi,

2021