Tziza's tea

the only rat that I have ever known

I walk him on a leash,

a tiny leash especially made for

“Singers sing. A sorceress laments her failing powers and an elusive conquest. A lover rehearses his desolation. A parent keens for lost children. Soprano, bass-baritone, contralto: voices have flooded the worlds of Mariele Neudecker. 

Neudecker has chased time about the globe, miniaturised mountains and charmed three dimensions out of two. Sound is the perfect territory through which to pursue these persistent preoccupations with time and space being materially indivisible from its temporal and spatial extension. 

In Neudecker’s tank works, such as Morning Fog in the Mountains (1997) and I Don’t Know How I Resisted the Urge to Run (1998), sculptural landscapes are viewed through fluids and suspensions that emulate romantic weather: mists, clouds and hazes. In Stay Here or Die (2002), Winterreise (2003) and Kindertotenlieder (2005) it is music that spills through the spaces around the image; it is music that gives us the vapours and shapes the atmosphere. We view Port Talbot through clouds of despair; we see sights from the sixtieth latitude north through misty heartache; alpine grandeur through a haze of grief. Of all art forms the discourse of music has maintained its faith in emotional affect and its hold upon a vocabulary of feelings. We listen to feel. The lover and the mourner sing to change the way the body feels, to breathe differently, to physically perform the sense of loss. 

In song, language works on the body and the body works on language. For Roland Barthes 1 this is why song thrills us: the visceral and symbolic rub against one another: we hear an image of the body in the utterance of the voice, the body at play in language.

Implicit in Barthes’ analysis is that all song defamiliarises language, heightening the acoustic, displacing the semantic, requiring a relearning. The body forms itself about the sounds of a language and about the emotional surfaces of the song. It becomes a matter of diction, of testing the sound of each letter against palette and tongue and throat and teeth; and of the body remembering the architecture of each sound.”

Extracted from Mariele’s Neudecker website

“For Sediment, Neudecker will present some key-pieces taking the visitors through various strands of her practice. This ranges from early map works, the “Plastic Vanitas” Still Life series, Deep-Sea and Arctic projects, including a new 2-dimensional and new tank work specially commissioned for the exhibition.  Harking back to the motifs, themes and aesthetics of Romanticism and the Sublime, her series of tank works contains sculptures of the natural world both nourished and mummified by the liquids in which they are preserved.  In promoting her enquiry into the relationship between the actual and the mediated, she keeps returning to looking at landscape traditions in art, dealing simultaneously with questions around technology, science, changes to our environment, collective experiences and time.”

From Dnote

“In her work Neudecker is exploring the interphases and overlaps of the two and three-dimensional, as well as analogue and digital. She uses a broad range of media including sculpture, film, photography as well as sound. Her practice investigates the formation and historical dissemination of cultural constructs around the natural and technological world and notions of a Contemporary Sublime. Neudecker often uses technology’s virtual capabilities in order to reproduce a heightened experience of landscape, thus addressing the subjective and mediated condition of any first hand encounter. She has worked with scientists and engineers and their methods and research. For her, technology both enables and limits our perception and experience of the worlds we inhabit”

“This is a landscape installation sited in a mountainous region in the Western part of Thanh Hoa province, Vietnam. The place is outstanding for its unique riverscape with elevated garden on the giant lime stone mountains. It is peaceful and wild on this site of the river but on the other side is a contradiction, the factories where bamboo are manufactured into household goods are poisoning  the river and people keep throwing their daily garbage directly to the river. They are two different worlds but sit next to each other, however this riverscape is becoming more and more vulnerable due to human’s growing activities.

This project aims to encourage people to be more aware of their surrounding environment, to  understand how sensitive the environment is and to protect this natural heritage for future generations. The way this small project is trying to communicate is through a metaphoric approach, seeing the landscape through a frame to understand it more and to gain a greater understanding of the environment. The renowned British artist Ashley Jackson, once said that: ” I thought if we could place frames among the landscape, it would help to focus the mind on to what is inside that frame: many people look but only a few see and feel its very soul “. Yes, “many people look but only a few see”. There is a certain difference between looking and seeing. If we have a frame to observe the landscape, it will limit the eyes to have a focus and give us a chance to have the insight of the landscape.

On site, the frame is placed towards the direction where the limestone mountain meets the river in order to present the characteristic of the landscape. A sitting is offered to enjoy the view more. When fully installed, it will be permanently there, people and visitors might walk by and have a chance to take a look.”

From World Landscape Architect

Beatriz Sánchez Santidrián, 2013

“…Y ¿dónde proyectar su cuerpo? En la superficie de un espejo. En la mayoría de sus obras, Francesca se sirvió de él para enfatizar la subjetividad de su fotografía, ya de por sí personal por el hecho de cultivar casi exclusivamente el autorretrato. Al utilizar el espejo, su imagen quedaba reflejada doblemente: en el cristal, pero también en el propio soporte fotográfico; porque incluso cuando no introduce el espejo, éste “está” indirectamente, ya que la fotografía suele definirse como el reflejo de una imagen.

Siguiendo los estudios psicoanalíticos de Jacques Lacan, discípulo de Sigmund Freud, la construcción de la identidad, es decir, de la subjetividad, se da a través de lo que él denomina “orden imaginario”; esta fase se produce en la primera etapa de vida, y en ella el bebé se reconoce a sí mismo por primera vez en la imagen de su madre, que es la única figura que ve, la única realidad que hasta entonces existe para él. Precisamente Lacan llama también a este orden el “estadio del espejo”, ya que éste facilita la construcción de la propia identidad a través de la identificación con el otro, que es su imagen reflejada en el espejo. Puesto que sujeto y objeto coinciden (yo), no existe la dualidad yo-lo otro: somos lo otro, lo que nos rodea. Y puesto que en este orden no existe ni espacio ni tiempo, nos movemos en coordenadas espacio-temporales indeterminadas, difusas. En la más absoluta universalidad.

Trasladando la idea desde la madre que ve el bebé al tema que nos ocupa, se podría decir que Francesca se enmarca en este orden imaginario: a través de la visión de su imagen vertida en el mundo, su propia realidad pasa de estar en un plano interno, subjetivo, a formar parte de una dimensión exterior; y esta “ficcionalización”, que le conduce a una experiencia de realidad, es lo que le ayuda finalmente a comprenderse mejor como persona y artista, y por tanto a construir su identidad. 

Pero esta proyección de su imagen no sólo la lleva a cabo en el espejo, sino también en la atmósfera y en el decorado que sirven como marco de sus fotografías. En ellas, el cuerpo se mimetiza con el escenario, se confunde con las sombras, se funde con el papel desprendido de la pared, se subordina al mobiliario, se disuelve en la luz; parece que quiera desaparecer entre las grietas de la pared o en el interior de una alacena. Francesca se autorretrata fundiéndose con su entorno porque no encuentra otro medio de reafirmarse y revelar su propio ser, porque “visible y móvil, mi cuerpo es numerable entre las cosas, es una de ellas, está cosido al tejido del mundo y su consistencia es la de una cosa. Pero cuando ve, cuando se mueve, cuando mantiene las cosas en un círculo a su alrededor, hace que las cosas se le adhieran o lo prolonguen, se incrusten en su carne, formen parte de su definición total; el mundo está hecho del mismo tejido que el cuerpo…”

From BaidBlog

[DISCLAIMER: this article is not a joke. this is a real aesthetic that some people enjoy, thank you.]

Originating on social media apps like Tumblr and Instagram in the late 2010s , Ratcore tends to intersect with other aesthetics such as Goblincore, Pigeoncore and Bastardcore. Many Ratcore photos are of people's pet rats or edited stock photos. Ratcore tends to have a "creepy-cute" aspect to it. This especially is prominent when visuals have soft colors, cute imagery, glitter, etc, as throughout history rats have been associated with disease, filth, and death. Sometimes Ratcore is portrayed as having a very chaotic aspect to it because of the "rabidness" and wilderness of the small animal.