HOMO CARNOSA
Homo Carnosa a project about our fleshy and organic connection, being part of an organic community of species, growths, mycelia and more then human fellows. Homo Carnosa is about the fleshy condition that combines us, about our human flesh in an organic world. Bodies are like natural landscapes that can be erotic, sensitive, swollen, vulgar, gloomy, beautiful and ugly at the same time. We are often ambivalent about our own bodies and our carnality.
The project Homo Carnosaconsists of multiple elements, threads, exhibitions, and diverse works. It is a thought, a method, a way of approaching. The project seeks to intervene in the viewer’s perception—for instance, through large, soft-red images of flesh that intrude upon the viewer and both attract and repel. These works short-circuit our learned systems of interpretation; they render the sensory space transgressive, honest, and direct. Embedded in the sensorial is a non-verbal intervention that reconnects the viewer to their organic origins and to the shared kinship we hold with all organic life on the planet. It is this shared interconnectedness that Signe Vad believes is essential if we are to transform our way of life into a socially and ecologically sustainable future.
Who is Homo Carnosa...
I lay completely still for many ages, a distraction made me rise. Horizontally, I could scan the landscape,
gaze across the terrain of shapes, of shells — some crumbling, others crisp and sharp, all filled with soft matter, smiling like eggs. From within, my skin began to tremble, to cramp, to stretch, to bubble. Touch was an explosion that connected me — fragments in a sensuous communion...the encounter with another being.
Hvem er Homo Carnosa...
Jeg lå helt stille i mange tider, en afledning fik mig til at stå. Horisontalt kunne jeg scanne landskabet, skue ud over landskabet af former, af skaller – nogle smuldrede andre sprøde og skarpe, alle proppet med blød masse, smilende som æg. Indefra begyndte min hud at sitre, krampe, forstrække sig, boble. Berøring var en eksplosion som forbandt mig, fragmenter i sanseligt fællesskab.. mødet med et andet væsen.
A Blueprint of Passion
Text by Elena Lundquist Ortiz and Astrid Wang
In the series Homo Carnosa (The fleshy human) the body is turned inside out and we find ourselves in the midst of the wet, red darkness of the abdominal cavity. The camera has zoomed in to the point where the forms become unrecognizable and abstract. The photographic works unfold as monumental, bloody landscapes: the soft, vulnerable human body has shed its skin casing to unveil its inner workings like a map. This cartography of flesh is devoid of coordinates and compass points; it consists of unravellings and decodings, without beginning or end, centre or periphery.
For millennia we have disciplined and restrained the unruly body, discipline being the hallmark of the civilised human being. The needs, desires and instincts of the body are strictly controlled, and what cannot be controlled is suppressed in the realm of the abject and taboo – concealed and silenced behind the polished surface of the skin. Science, on the other hand, has scrutinised human anatomy in minute detail, naming its components, demarcating organs and defining their functions to replace the uncontrollable, shameful body with a neutralised, teleological entity, the main function of which is to fulfil the design of evolution.
There is a third body, which cannot be contained by cultural taboos or scientific classification. The real body. The entirety that constitutes our being-in-the-world. It is this vigorous, chaotic and passionately sensing body that exposes the inadequacies of language. The language of science is the Latin of classification and designation. Homo Carnōsa appropriates Latin terminology to disrupt its hegemony and liberate the lifeblood – a lifeblood that refuses to be contained by rationality and the superego of reason, but undermines its control and points literally and aesthetically inwards towards the lost Dionysian state in which we forget ourselves – if only for the split second of the image.
There Are No More Dolls in the Closet – Only a Respirator
Duration 16:18 min.
videowork 2018 (udsnit)
We Have Chaos Inside Us
the Exhibition Platform TYS, Copenhagen DK, 2015
Vi har kaos i os
Udstillingsstedet TYS, København DK, 2015
