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"Rupture" Performance
My name is Natalia, I am a Spanish multidisciplinary artist, and I live in Cambridgeshire. I completed two years of art studies in Madrid, Spain, before studying Fine Arts at ARU.
My practice transmutes a life of sexism and grief due to reproductive loss into a performative installation. It is an exploration of calcification: the way trauma hardens around a person until protection itself becomes a prison.
Rupture
My practice translates eight years of displacement, sexism, and reproductive loss into a performative installation. It is an exploration of calcification: the way trauma hardens around a person until the protection itself becomes a prison.
During the installation, I inhabit the cage nude, my skin entirely encased in a layer of dry, brittle plaster. What begins in absolute, suffocating stillness transitions into a frustration, helplessness, visceral struggle of movement. Driven by the memory of desperation, anxiety, and the claustrophobia of both an abusive and sexist history and a grieving womb, the plaster "skin" begins to crack and fall. This is the shattering of the husk. Thanks to the sound system, the minimal noises of the falling material are amplified, turning a silent mental struggle into a deep and unsettling sound experience for the audience."
By placing broken plaster fragments throughout the room, I invite the audience to participate in the destruction. As they walk around the cage, their weight grinds the remains of my history into finer dust. This forces a physical complicity; the viewer becomes part of the weight that breaks the survivor, while simultaneously aiding in the process of pulverizing the past so it can finally be blown away.
This project is an invitation to witness the moment protection becomes a prison, and terrifying, beautiful effort required to break free from one’s own calcified history.
Victor Verdú Bernal, 3rd year Film and Media student, helped with the lights, audio and film in the performance video.
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