La Specola (2004)
The multi-sensorial installation La Specola employs video narratives, tactile sculpture, surveillance and a 3D touch-screen interface to address the mingling of myth and medicine in gynecology.
Innumerable cultures with a lasting written or oral history reference the archetype of the vagina dentata. The cultural fantasy of teeth in soft, dark places informs Western medicine’s approaches to the vagina. At heart in both myth and medicine is to control and make visible the body’s mysterious caverns, which are at once seductive, grotesque, pathological, and sacred.
The interactive installation “La Specola” is an invitation to experience themes of violation, pleasure and fear within the structure of medical examination. Jiggly, tactile latex sculptures and cloying beeswax panels position viewers’ bodies within the installation, provoking visceral responses to reveal our cultural conditioning to the abject, the pleasurable, and the taboo.
Many thanks to: Culture, Brain and Development grant for La Specola: Medical Examination & Archetypes of the Vagina Dentata interactive multimedia installation (Hampshire College & The Foundation for Psycho-Cultural Research); H.I.P. grant for performance art & exhibition; Collective Image grant for photographic art; Samuel Butler; Brian Kendall; Michael Dessen; Mariangeles Soto-Diaz; Christoph Cox; Baba Hillman; Megan Palaima; Ben Mauer; Elena Bayrock; Zane Thimmesch-Gill; Nadia Berrigan; Gary Berrigan.
La Specola (2004)
The centerpiece of the installation is a textural latex sculpture with intrusions and protrusions through which participants interact with a touch-screen video interface. The sculpture must be penetrated awkwardly, performing the desire and difficulty of reaching within the body that is at the heart of the will to know. While engaging with the sculpture, participants are monitored by surveillance cameras, which others may watch on TV’s located inside small pods on the floor. To do so, they must climb inside the pods and lie on their backs with their legs sticking out: assuming the lithotomy position of gynecology. The stations are therefore both privileged and vulnerable. An intimate performance unfolds between the material works and the participants’ neighboring bodies, through which a space opens up to critically examine social behaviors.
The trilogy of videos, including Teeth in the Wrong Places, Concoctions and Spills, creates shifting roles of performance and storytelling that complicate the power dynamics of medical scopic regimes. Within the three videos, historical and contemporary ideas intermingle to form a portrait of our relationship to gender, the body’s viscera, and the conditioning of embodiment set forth by myth and medicine.
