Eva Fàbregas
Eva Fàbregas: Pumping, 2019 Kunstverein München
Oversized inflatables crawling into a room. Subwoofers emitting sub-sonic frequencies. Membranes that resonate through elasticity and texture. Eva Fàbregas conveys her interest for somatic engagement in her sonic sculptures. Massive but tender, her installations envelop the viewer in vibration and energy to activate a physical bond – as an invitation to enter the depths of bodily presence in the world and the crevices of its meaning. Engaging with issues of affect, the lingering impression of body memory, and the nuanced nature of sensory experience, Eva’s approach to technology looks at processes of symbiosis, nurturing relationships, and inter-species biological connections as communicative models. In its vibrating materiality, Eva’s work appeals to decompression, seducing us to envision a different future for the technologically-mediated production – and consumption – of desires and affects.
EVA FABREGAS: Eva Fàbregas: Pumping, 2019 Kunstverein München.Produced within the framework of the programme Support for Creation of ‘‘la Caixa’’
You’ve been working with sound as an integral part of your sculptural pieces by introducing listening as something that happens on the skin – a tactile impression rather than an acoustic one. What has originally prompted you to explore sound through the sense of touch?
The first initial idea for this work was inspired by a physical, bodily experience during a clubbing night at Corsica Studios in London. The sub-bass was so loud that you could only feel the beat throbbing and animating each cell of your body. An internal listening that begins at the pit of the stomach. Acoustic and haptic experiences produce an immediate physical response in our bodies. In my last show I worked with this idea of tactile sound. I wanted to play with sound and mechanic vibration as an energy capable of bringing to life my sculptures, animating their materiality while also stimulating the viewer’s body.
The show presented three massive inflatables crawling across the space that were activated by a choreography of sub-sonic frequencies, elastic rhythms and textural sounds by the Jamaican electronic collective Equiknoxx. A dozen subwoofers attached to these inflatable sculptures transformed them into resonating membranes – somewhere in between a church organ and a car sound-system, as curator Chris Fitzpatrick said.
Eva Fàbregas: Pumping, 2019 Kunstverein München.Produced within the framework of the programme Support for Creation of ‘‘la Caixa’’
Eva Fàbregas: Pumping, 2019 Kunstverein München. Produced within the framework of the programme Support for Creation of ‘‘la Caixa’’
EVA FABREGAS: Bite Plate, 2019 Kunstverein München. Produced within the framework of the programme Support for Creation of ‘‘la Caixa’’
Counter to the primacy of sight and hearing, you focus on the value of touch, on haptic perception and communication, body memory, and the ways surfaces influence our experience of the world. This brings me back to something I’ve recently been looking into, which is skin-to-skin contact – the early and uninterrupted physical contact between mother and infant. It’s a sensory experience that improves bonding and positively affects the baby’s health, emotional wellness and brain development. Is there a link between the development of your practice and direct, lived experiences that involve physical and psychological contact?
Lately I’ve been thinking about the relationship I had with orthodontic braces as a teenager. It’s quite fascinating to think about the physical bond and close interdependence between one’s own teeth and this prosthetic device, so deeply embedded into my body that, even so many years after it was removed, it has left me a body memory akin to the experience of a phantom-limb. In my work there is a primacy of the somatic. I think a lot about how can sculpture deal with questions of embodiment, affect and experience. But also how can art engage somatically (not just semiotically) with the world around us. Going back to your question, something that comes immediately to mind is Octavia Butler’s ‘Xenogenesis’ book series.
Traditionally, in male-dominated science fiction, writers had always imagined ‘superior’ alien species as ethereal and disembodied creatures, pure mental beings emancipated from the constraints of organic life. This is a such a modernist (and male) fantasy… But things are pretty different when a writer like Octavia Butler imagines an advanced alien species. In her books, alien life-forms have developed through symbiosis with a thousand other species and their thinking is inseparable from the body and the world around them.
For these alien creatures, learning and communication are haptic processes. Knowledge takes place at skin level. Even their technology is based on biological processes that exist in close interdependence with other animals and plants. What I find in Butler’s books is a more integrated and hopeful way of thinking about the future of technology. But also a ‘mothering’ or nurturing perspective on the future of life itself.
Eva Fàbregas: Kimberley & Chloe, 2019. Kunstverein München. Produced within the framework of the programme Support for Creation of "la Caixa".
Eva Fàbregas: Kimberley & Chloe, 2019. Nancey, 2019. Kunstverein München.
Photo: Lukasz Michalak. Produced within the framework of the programme Support for Creation of "la Caixa"
Eva Fàbregas: Bite Plate, 2019; Kimberley & Chloe, 2019; Nancey, 2019. Kunstverein München
Photo: Lukasz Michalak
Produced within the framework of the programme Support for Creation of "la Caixa"
Regarding how surfaces mediate our experience of the world, your work also made me think of a spectrum of objects that are designed and produced to satisfy many of our present day needs. They are items with specific qualities – they are hard, clean, smooth, sleek, cold, inert. Your work seems to play with these characteristics, but also questions them by bringing affect, emotion, desire and eroticism in the discussion. Can you speak about how you approach the idea of commodity?
Desire is by definition impossible to satisfy. What I find fascinating is the constant production of new desires, not their satisfaction. What happens when industrial design, architecture and technology reconfigure our desires and affects? These are the kind of questions that drive my work. I find inspiration in the way objects are capable of channelling, sparking or even producing new desires. How desires become form (and vice versa). It’s kind of unsettling when you think of the massive role that affects play in capitalism. The boom of consumer culture was based on the adoption of modern psychology by corporations willing to exploit the unconscious desires of consumers.
But even in the early years of the Soviet Union, a key concern for artists like Popova and Rodchenko was how to channel affects and desires into industrial products, so that citizens would take good care of them. One way or another, the erotics of production and the production of new desires are crucial to understand the present. That’s especially true in the porn-saturated, hyper-accelerated virtual landscapes of the 21st century. I am very interested in this multiplication and intensification of desires. It’s like a social experiment on an unprecedented scale we are all unknowingly part of.
Eva Fàbregas: Shaper, 2019; Kimberley & Chloe, 2019; Nancey, 2019. CentroCentro. Photo: Lukasz Michalak
Produced within the framework of the programme Support for Creation of "la Caixa"
Eva Fàbregas: Polifilia, 2019 García Galería
Photo: Roberto Ruiz
Your work also speaks of the human body in relation to prosthetic elements, those inert materials that have been naturalized and have become one with it, as if they were actual body parts. Thinking about these attached objects, or components, the hypothesis of losing them is frightening. What is your perspective on the possibility of loss? Do you think detachment from this specific kind of artificial limbs will ever be necessary – and how would that prospect unfold?
More than the idea of loss, what really intrigues me is the nature of this bond between technologies and the body. Going back to my past experience with dental braces: It’s only recently that I’ve realised the extent to which I had developed a romance with these prosthetics as a teenager. When I had my braces removed, my teeth began to miss that pressure and in a very physical and often painful way.
Even today, it’s strangely comforting for me to apply strong pressure on my front teeth using my fingers. Not unlike a phantom-limb experience, in which there is an acute awareness of a missing limb that comes with anxiety. This means that my body remembers dental braces (a prosthetic technology) as an integral part of my body that is now missing. You could say that this is an erotic relationship of sorts, as if my body missed that exoskeleton made of titanium and stainless-steel, longing for the sense of containment it provided.
I think our relationship with prosthetics has a strong erotic dimension because it involves desire, attraction, discipline, power and control… This very human capacity to generate a physical and emotional bond, a sense of attachment and interdependency with technologies is what really fascinates me.
EVA FABREGAS: Picture yourself as a block of melting butter, 2018 CCA 2018 Royal College of Art, in partnership with Gasworks and Resonance FM, London. Photo: Martim Ramos
EVA FABREGAS: Picture yourself as a block of melting butter, 2018 CCA 2018 Royal College of Art, in partnership with Gasworks and Resonance FM, London. Photo: Martim Ramos
courtesy EVA FÀBREGAS
interview VERONICA GISONDI
More to read
