14m

This piece investigates human awareness, which allows us to imagine suffering, and can itself be a source of suffering. The artist - a priori to the opening of the exhibition – was walled (built) into the museum space using soap bars. Her presence was emphasised through the visible absence of the performer’s body, in connection to architecture and the melting of time distortion. The artist didn’t disappear but shifted the state of the reality and the perception of the audience through her existence as a physical statement in space.

The act of foundation offerings stems from antiquity and can be found in different myths and artistic representations across cultures, based on the motif of human sacrifice. This performance of a foundation offering became a holistic experience, when the perception of the place and the work led to reflections on the fragile, if not unrealistic, foundations of human existence. The artist was becoming the space that surrounds the spectator.

The title refers to a modern myth related to the Corviale – an architectural place of (failed) residential utopias of the twentieth century. The famously one-kilometre-long housing complex measures only 986 metres. 14 metres are on one hand myth, myth construction and myth destruction, on the other an open invitation to the audience to investigate the museum through bodily space, by measuring it with one’s own footsteps, by playing with the perception of the size of the physical dimension of the room. The artist’s implementation of destabilized metric and imperial systems in relation to the bodily experience.

Soap is often associated with washing the conscience or ending something, some relationship, or some situation. The contrast between the material and the action of setting new foundations is a mix of temporary and more long-term comments on a setting that is subject to a process of constant change. The process of construction created a utopian counter-model to the architecture since the material itself hinders the assemblage of the single elements of the wall. The performative action hence anticipated the process of degradation. While the olfactory element of the installative element of the work, plays yet with micro- and macro-perception, and produces a lasting impression capable of constituting a visual representation.