Three questions for Natalía Dominguez
Artist Natalia Domínguez works with installation, sculpture, and sound to explore the relationships between subject and object within post-industrial landscapes. Her performance Ralentí: ticking over, developed specifically for the festival, brings a non-binary, feminist choir into dialogue with engine sounds. The work challenges the connection between masculinity, technology, and collective identity—serving as both a sonic intervention and a political gesture that re-composes existing power structures.
CURRENT: In Ralentí: ticking over, you engage directly with car engines and invite performers to create a chorus alongside these machines. What kinds of connections or new relationships do you hope to reveal between technology, gender, and the body through this interaction?
Natalia Domínguez: The title of the performance, Ralentí: ticking over, refers to the noise of engines when running in neutral, a sound that is rooted in a predominantly masculine imagination. Car sound design is directly connected with the industrial revolution, where machines became associated with masculinity, and the noise of industry became a symbol of strength, progress and dominance.
In this performance, a Chorus of FLINTA/Non-Binary people use their voices to compose a sound piece that relates to the mechanisms of car engines, in an attempt to create a new polyphony where traditionally silenced and marginalized voices rise to challenge the gendered dynamics of technology. But the performance also pays attention to how air acts both as the medium that powers engines and as the vital element shared by all living beings; a bridge between human breath and machine function that emphases how both rely on interdependent flows.
CURRENT: Air plays a central role in your project. How do you see the act of “breathing together” functioning as a form of resistance or transformation in a post-industrial, petro-capitalist context?
Natalia Domínguez: We are not inhabitants of the earth, but of the atmosphere, Emanuele Coccia says. But that atmosphere, initially conceived as impalpable and indefinite, is the result of a series of oppressive and extractive conditions that affect our bodies directly.
Breathing connects the inside of our bodies with the environment, as well as proposes a collective encounter where all living beings relate by the exchange of oxygen and CO2. To me “breathing together” becomes an everyday yet radically transgressive act that can help us imagine how to generate more empathetic, less extractive and more regenerative relationships among us and with the environment.
CURRENT: What was your relationship to air as a material and concept before developing this project? How has it evolved through your recent work?
Natalia Domínguez: My first approach to air happened while working with “transmutable” materials. At first, I was very interested in “unstable” materialities that need another element to be shaped. From here I developed the series ST (parachute), a group of sculptures that get inspiration from aerial protection devices as tools that mediate in between our bodies and the atmosphere, as well as some other sculptures that focus on industrial pipes and their consideration of rigid elements that shape gas and air flows.
These works helped me discover that some of these materialities where not only complicated to be defined, but also complicated to be seen. Air was one of these materialities.
Feminist philosopher Luce Irigaray argues that the consideration of air as “emptiness” is the consequence of centuries of Western thought that has privileged the solid, the visible, the stable –while “forgetting” the materiality of everything else. This forgetting can be, in part, explained because air itself escapes visibility, as the molecules that compose it are too small to be perceived by human eyes. But what Irigaray helps us see is how air has been made invisible, kept out of sight. This in-visibility has real, embodied consequences. And excludes all the things that are not: the in-betweens, the grays, the fluids, the forgotten.
My recent work explores how the invisible narratives around air condition the way we interact with each other and subdue the world we live in, slowly shifting my artistic interest toward the social and political dimensions of air as a shared medium that connects bodies, environments and technologies. “Ralentí: ticking over” aims to enhance these connections by a collective voice, exploring the materialities of breathing air together to create new discourses.
Photo Credits:
© Roberto Ruíz
