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"Encyclopedia of Relations: Crown Shyness" 2023

Wall text

Wall text

Alexandra Pirici

Born 1982, Bucharest, Romania. Lives and works in Bucharest, Romania.

 

"Crown Shyness" 2022

single channel video, sound, 10:03 minutes

 

Courtesy of the artist. Commissioned by Audemars Piguet Contemporary. Performed by Noemi Calzavara, Maria Mora, Alexandra Pirici.

Alexandra Pirici’s moving image work responds to ‘crown shyness’, a phenomenon where certain species of trees in a forest grow around each other, collectively negotiating access to space and light. In Australia, it can be observed in the irregular openings of sky within forest canopies of some Eucalyptus. Taking the form of a choreographed performance, the movement principles developed for Crown Shyness were woven into Pirici’s later work Encyclopedia of Relations, performed at the 59th Venice Biennale.

Pirici is known for exploring human and non-human relations through embodiment. By assembling formations of performers as live sculptures, the artist develops choreographic gestures that draw from a myriad of sources such as biology, botany, and machine learning. In Crown Shyness, Pirici zooms in on the interactions between trees, observing and recording their growth patterns through human embodiment. Unfolding as a gradual progression of poses against a wall, the movements of the performers produce an attentiveness to our own bodies. In this way, Crown Shyness displaces ocular perception, transposing vegetal intelligence into somatic knowledge. Through movement practice as a research enquiry, Pirici gives shape to a more entangled and reciprocal means of social relations.

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