The Larva Cycle is an ongoing
project by Lana Lehpamer, whose third part – Consumption – is
presented here, in the AfterWorld. The cycle began with Arrival,
the 24-hour performance Bog Body (2022), in which the artist
materialized an unattainable fictional spirit within a body sewn
from nylon stockings and filled with 20 liters of soil. Its
second part, Preparation – an overflowing deformation of the
earlier body (installed at the 37th Youth Salon) – used the same
materials to figuratively “prepare the meat” for the next stage:
Consumption. With Consumption, the artist continues the act of
creating a body by consuming corporeality – her own or a
fictional one understood as activity – thus literally embodying
Judith Butler’s statement: “one is not a body, one does a body.”
The body becomes hungry and acquires a voice, intertwining with
the artist’s own. Its life narrative unfolds through poetry,
through which the artist translates the needs and intentions of
the fictional spirit. Themes of weight, tension, strain,
ambiguity, uncertainty, mutual influence, interpenetration, and
the blurring of skin boundaries read as elements in this
performance.
Visual courtesy of the artist
The Larva Cycle is an ongoing
project by Lana Lehpamer, whose third part – Consumption – is
presented here, in the AfterWorld. The cycle began with Arrival,
the 24-hour performance Bog Body (2022), in which the artist
materialized an unattainable fictional spirit within a body sewn
from nylon stockings and filled with 20 liters of soil. Its
second part, Preparation – an overflowing deformation of the
earlier body (installed at the 37th Youth Salon) – used the same
materials to figuratively “prepare the meat” for the next stage:
Consumption. With Consumption, the artist continues the act of
creating a body by consuming corporeality – her own or a
fictional one understood as activity – thus literally embodying
Judith Butler’s statement: “one is not a body, one does a body.”
The body becomes hungry and acquires a voice, intertwining with
the artist’s own. Its life narrative unfolds through poetry,
through which the artist translates the needs and intentions of
the fictional spirit. Themes of weight, tension, strain,
ambiguity, uncertainty, mutual influence, interpenetration, and
the blurring of skin boundaries read as elements in this
performance.
Visual courtesy of the artist