sci-fi fable and installation, Anna Ehrenstein and Sunny Pfalzer
with Lucy Tomasino, Alexa Evangelista and Josh Davila, 2024
Goethe-Institut New York
(c) Marc Tatti
A slightly distorted live version of Madonna’s iconic “Like a Virgin” resonates as a crypto ballerinas and three sirenas, futuristic looking humanoids dressed in colourful and patterned garments, dance on a pebbled beach by a lake on a volcano. Their choreography, midway between a drag performance and a post-apocalyptic music video, is chaotic, cacophonic, and disorienting, yet also alluringly seductive and mesmerizing. Bitcoins rain from the sky, greeted by twerking and cries of pleasure.
Welcome to the intersections of wetness and the crypto mining process. Cripto Sirenas is a temporary collective made up of Anna Ehrenstein, Alexa Evangelista, Sunny Pfalzer, and Lucy Tomasino, and their self-described science-fiction and multimedia worldbuilding venture aimed at speculating on tech-solutionism, totalitarian algorithms and the impact of these growing realities our bodies and environments. Rooted in a hydro-feminist worldview, the work centres on water, fluidity, and moisture as an embodied conduit for defying contemporary and future systems of oppression and exploitation that enforce rigidity, binaries, and categorization. In various fable and dreamlike scenes, from public urban monuments to remote watery natural locations, the project highlights how developing economic and resource extraction models rely on forms of crypto colonialism rooted in the old world and threatening to haunt future ones.
This multimodal landscape of cyborg ballerinas has at its heart a 360° video projection conceived out of a somatic writing process that immerses the viewer in a captivating narrative Throughout the installation, the artists rearticulate and rethink the mediatization of their bodies in various artifacts. Two-dimensional remnants—brightly patterned wallpapers, punchy collages, and heavily edited photographs—provide context for the scattered three-dimensional sculptural representations and appendages of the artist’s performing selves that populate the space. Video recorded theoretical conversations with web3 researcher Josh Davila mix and contrast with an organic ecology that combines the digital with the physical; the real with the more-than-un-real; the messy, leaky multi-faceted humanoid with the sleekness of the mainframe. Multiplying their presence throughout, the Cripto Sirenas are an ever-evolving proposition, submerging their audience into a wash cycle of information, affect, and movement, a living altar and a Manifesto for Moist Futures.
(Didier Morelli)
Quebec Biennale and Musée d’art de Joliette (c) Maryse Boyce
Städtische Galerie Nordhorn
(c) Helmut Claus
