Los acontecimientos (The Happenings) unfolded during an artist residency in Sierra de Aracena, Spain, through small gestures of release. I recorded one idea for an artwork every other day. Each idea lured me toward creation, yet I let it go, in an attempt to resist the demand to be productive and allow for rest. I made a ceramic urn for each idea, and held a funeral ceremony to remember and lay them all to rest. An olive tree was planted, in loving memory.

Video installation that emerged from a curiosity about emotions evoked by fiction and the so-called paradox of fiction. It presents a series of weeping faces, setting side by side each person’s responses to three different triggers: a fictional film, a personal experience, and an onion.

What happens when one experiences a fictional love story not in a film, a play or the pages of a novel, but in one’s own reality? Can such a staged romance be experienced as if it were real? During my stay in Japan I collaborated with rental boyfriend Natsuto to create a romantic story from a series of dates he would usually offer as a service. Capturing spontaneous moments of these dates with our smartphones, this fictional romance unfolded as a fragmented narrative, hinting at how intimate experiences are increasingly curated and shared today and exploring a blurring line between intimacy and performance.

A short sci-fi film set in the near future where two ex-lovers sit together, absorbed in a censored version of a porn film they once watched uncensored. Their exchange unfolds between the plot of the film and how pixels aren’t what everyone thinks. As they chat, their past intimacy lingers in the air.

A bossa nova song playing in the background, the sound of air shaken by a fan. Every now and then, the flipping of a magazine page, water poured in a paper cup, a candy unwrapped. A Ladybug on Your Hand recalls a waiting room, but it is not your usual waiting room. The TV monitor and magazines in the room turn the attention inward, towards an archive of mental images that one would hardly encounter in the media.

Pixel Perfect Guided Visualization offers the visualization of an image, one pixel at a time. Turned into a moving image and projected onto a square-shaped wall, the image becomes simultaneously hyper-visible and avisual – not perceptible to the human eye. A voice-over meditates on whether an image that never emerges in its entirety might enable “to see” more, and moves the focus towards the images that are carried and produced in the imagination.

Video installation where the internet connection appears to be interrupted and three screens start chatting with one another, each seemingly embodying a consciousness that gets nervous when it has no image to offer.

El sabor de una ostra por primera vez (The Taste of an Oyster for The First Time) is a site-specific intervention where the usual magazines in a dental clinic waiting room are replaced with new, alternative magazines. These alternative magazines propose a literary exploration that plays with the viewer’s mental imagery. Beginning with what recalls a photo report that could easily belong to a typical waiting room magazine, the narrative swiftly transitions into evoking a story that is both strangely intimate and relatable to the experience of waiting.

A person narrates the moment of her own death. When she sees the famous bright white light at the end, she soon understands that it is actually formed by the images of her entire lifetime. The Light explores how subjectivity is produced in and through images, and how these images are culturally and temporally shaped. In a hyper-visual world, are there any images that remain invisible or unseen? To what extent do we share our mental images with one another?

For more documentation get in touch at kivasakona@gmail.com

For more documentation get in touch at kivasakona@gmail.com