Nicole De Brabandere
| Superhero Imagination | ||
This series of objects, movements and fabulatory narratives is the result of an investigation into the relationship between bodily movement and prosthetic objects. These works complicate the distinction between the mundane, the material and ideal by proposing, extending and augmenting the human form, to develop fabulatory functions and narratives. The limitation of the body, sentience and artifact are renegotiated so that the rhythms of the repetitive and mundane physical actions can become a site of creative potential.
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 Superhero Imagination installation view (2012)
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Superhero Imagination (2012) 8:59 min | ||
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As
the water seeped in through the sides of her goggles, the light aqua blue of the public pool became increasingly murky. The darker it became, the more she lost her bearings and the specific dimensions of her physical containment. Eventually, her own body began to lose shape, stretching out like the nebulous pseudopodia of an amoeba. Blood and water freely intermingled and she felt herself coursing through the warm pumping fluid of her own veins.
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 All the brass knuckles in the world would not have enabled him to lay a punch. What drew him was the way that the power of his fist could be extended into a material that was harder than his strongest bone; he could imagine the precisely executed pivots and contractions of his internal choreography all the more vividly as they moved through the guided motions.
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 There was one moment in the performance that really stayed with her: that endlessly rehearsed lunge of the grand plié: the downward pressure on her muscles and joints forcing her knees to bend outwards, followed by a sustained tension to hold the position at its deepest point, and finally the release and subsequent return to the standing position. The motion played over and over until it seemed to take on a life of its own, though she couldn't determine whether her body began to perform the motion without her being conscious of it, or if the motion left her body entirely, taking on an independent life, free of any physical constraint. | ||
 Every
time he looked into the bathroom mirror, he'd examine his budding biceps. In time, as his strength increased, the initially feeble muscular mound that sat on his upper arm began to develop into a most impressive display of form and elegance. An array of dynamic shapes started to emerge from the once smooth surface of his muscle tissue, as if a complex‐shaped balloon were being inflated from the inside. Fanning out in perfect unison, the forms' showed themselves to be more elaborate with every flex.
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 He
sat there, stroking the contour of your silhouette at regularly paced intervals. He imagined that the stubby fingers, which typically punctuated the extremity of his arm, began to grow like the searching tendrils of a pea plant. The tightly wound coils of his fingerprints stretched and elongated to the point that he was no longer himself. His newfound reach made his sensitivity to the world unbearable. | ||
 The
embarrassment was so extreme that he began to feel his body dissolve into the shadows. After a few moments, the only part of him that remained visible was a reflection of white light that continued bounce off his sweating forehead. Slowly, he inched himself away from the crowd and receded into the distance, like the heroic glint off an airplane flying into the sunset. |
