This is a site-specific installation that was produced in La Usurpadora residency’s courtyard (Puerto Colombia, Colombia). We wanted visitors to have access to a leisurely and romantic atmosphere where they can relax, shower, sunbathe, and enjoy a beer.
Cole and Angelica met last year in New York while pursuing their MFA in Visual Arts at Columbia University. One day, Cole came to Angelica’s studio and proposed they work together, his existential sculptures mixed with her emotional architecture. This is how Angelica thought that this collaboration should start in a very inspiring place like Puerto Colombia.
___________________________________________________
Text written for Usurpadora residency.
Two artists who may or may not have slept together decide to share a project. They name eroticism as the site of collaboration. But how do you stay friends when there’s an erotic undertone? Is there friendship without erotic undertones? In a romantic comedy like When Harry Met Sally, flirtation leads to the impossibility of friendship after romance. Maybe collaborators can’t be friends either: Opposing positions, four hands, diverging goals. When the movie is brought up, Angelica says, “For me it’s just an American movie. I’m tired of relationships,” and Cole, wallowing inside obsession itself, as he has been stuck “trying to navigate friendship with this other girl I want to sleep with…." makes the reference "which seems appropriate to mention because one of the big things our work has in common is privileging existential crises.” Still they desire to make a new space, desire to be tired by desire, desire to get hurt, and desire to go with the flow.
Location frames the question of an art cum erotic object: to make a sculpture that externalizes fraught desires. Angelica: “Usurpadora in particular is a place where art can be a part of every person’s life in a place where people don’t care about art. I’m more interested in these issues than an intellectually elite art. You say every day existential crises, for me it’s every day common needs.” To which Cole replies,“Though we might in the end be inventing a captive breeding ground, via fucking each other, ourselves, the audience. What if people don’t like shower sex? What if we’re negatively affecting biodiversity and genetic fitness?”
How can they deal with all this? Can they keep idealistic and remain modern? The only way to stay contemporary is to go back to the beginning. The beginning as in like the Garden of Eden. Why not? But they’re rebuilding Eden with a different tree. Not the tree of good and evil. Instead a shower tree, that washes off the guilt and shame of the world and lets people get together however they want to.