PART 4:::::
PART 3:::::
PART 2:::::
PART 1:::::
Jazmin Taco & Mike Nguyen
performance live:
I want to become one with the Eidolon
Performance: Jazmin Taco & Mike Nguyen
Title: I want to become one with the Eidolon
Date: Day 17 April 2018 Time: 14:00-20.00 (Switzerland time)
Place: – Act:Dampzentrale Bern. – www.onlineperformanceart.com – Transmitted live
Sound:
- * Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex by Sigmund FREUD / link
- *On The Shortness of Life by Seneca / link
- *The Myth of Sisyphus, by Albert Camus
- *Civilization and Its Discontents by Sigmund Freud / link
- * Studies in the Psychology of Sex / link
Description:
The process of the Eidolon 1. Taking the selfie as a continuous, durational performance with bodies and technology. 2. The selection of the selfie of the person I want to be part of my thesis. 3. Making and sending out the questionnaire. One question in the questionnaire is: Would you like this selfie to be painted? If the answer is yes, I paint it. 4. The process of turning the digital material into a painting. This process in which my body, my mind and specially my hands can touch, feel and smell the organic material is very satisfying. I feel and enjoy the sensual connection that I have with the material: touching the wood, cutting it, smelling it, allows my organism to perceive qualities of the object like temperature, its roughness, softness, hardness, weight. For the process of making the canvas Mike Nguyen is my guide. He is doing a Master in Contemporary Art as a painter at the University of the Arts in Bern. I’m lucky that my studio is next to his. In my eyes he is a painting expert and a very generous and talented artist. We’ve met two years ago in a sculpture seminar and since October 2017 we are working together. He helps me to reflect about my work and the process. In conversation, I explain my ideas and thoughts to him and it clarifies them for me. He guides me in making the transition from the digital selfie to the real painting. Making the frame is like making a sculpture. Mike helps me to find the right format of the frame, we cut the wood, assemble the frame and sand it. When the frame is finished, we stretch the canvas on the wood. Then we bath the framed canvas in very liquid white paint and let it dry until the next day. This process feels like a ritualistic performance. 5. Painting the canvas. The act of painting feels like a performance as well. I paint the canvas with my extremely long fingernails. They have become a tool which I use in my artistic practice since 2016 to make my sculptures and painted objects. My nails are my extended body. For me it is easier to paint or make details of the sculptures with my nails, because they are directly connected to my body and is more precise. I figured out my own method of ‘tectonic’ painting with my nails. I have very long nails since ten years already. Before studying art, I was trained as an aesthetician in Switzerland, that’s also a reason why my art is influenced by ‘contemporary beauty’ which is exaggerated with my extremely long nails. The process of painting the Eidolon on the canvas is traditional and contemporary at the same time. I use oil colours, and like in classic paintings, I use gold. I like to play with the symbolism of art history and my indigenous background at the same time, that’s why I use the colour gold, which was used in art history as the symbol of Heaven, and the golden Mask of the Incas’ God. I mix the colour gold with my menstrual blood. I am collecting my menstrual blood since I started this project in 2015 and preserved it in the freezer. I took one part of this frozen blood to start the first paining. When I saw my own blood, I had to fight with my fears: This is me, my cells already dead, maybe my own blood will look like this when I am dead … I’ve touched my blood, my fingers get red, it smells like chicken meat or pork when I take it out of the freezer. It does not smell bad, I feel affection and pain, a dead part of me, I touch it with my fingers and I try to feel myself, I fall in melancholy, I feel that the human condition is very fragile. I take the blood out of the glass with my finger and put it on the canvas. At that moment I start to feel the desire to paint and put more of my blood with my fingers and nails on the canvas. I want to make myself one with the canvas, I want to connect again with my dead blood. It hurts me when I see the intensity and texture of the blood change, the ecstasy of trying to be one with the painting leaves me. When I paint areas like the vagina, the face, the breasts, I feel carnal and painful eroticism. I feel the anatomical, organic and iconic sexuality of someone who somewhat no longer exists, I feel my fleeting presence, my body that I love and I feel sorry for not treating it better in order to live longer. The Eidolons are icons from that unique moment with the other, I try to paint the other as an icon and me as a female body, that’s why I’m nude in these paintings and the other is not. I respect the body of the other, I don’t want to hurt the feelings of the other by being exposed to the public on a painting. With my body I can do whatever I want. While painting, I go back to take selfies with my hands full of blood. I still have not painted on the day of the menstruation. I feel that I am not ready for it yet. Somehow I imagine that painting with the blood during menstruation will feel like a baby recently died. A baby that was never born. That I will never have. Part of me wants to have more babies but the trauma that I have lived with my daughter, I don’t want to experience again. Live is hard enough. That’s why humour and spontaneity is important in my artistic practice. That’s why I try to make the paintings light, a little allegoric and funny. Sexual and funny.
Jazmin Taco Originally from Ecuador live and works in Switzerland Mike Nguyen from Switzerland and Vietnam. www.jazmintaco.ch
