Zoo on Zoo (performance and wall mural)(2011)

Zoo on Zoo, in Bright Flashes Exhibition
Performance written and choreographed by Zoo Somaini Cardelús

In order to continue to process and recognise Zoo's adolescence and growing independence, a process we had begun recording in the Japan project, Zoo designed his own performance within my exhibition, Bright Flashes. He took photographs of his body and joined them digitally into a single, continuous surface of skin surface dotted with beauty marks. When projected in negative onto a wall, his beauty marks became bright spots, like stars, in a dark, skin-space. He drew freely onto the wall (interacting with the projection) of the main exhibition space during the three hours of the opening, directly across from my own portrait of Zoo, age 15. He used his own body to create a personal cosmology defining a fiercely personal and separate space within my world. This relates to my overarching project to use my work as a way of combining life and art as a way of fleshing out and resolving the tensions within the home and our relationships, in this case marking, as in tribal rituals of manhood (the first hunt or other), the public recognition of is maturity and independence.

Maggie Cardelús, 2011