BLANCA BARBAT
The Body as Threshold, 2024/2025
Installation, Film: CG experimental film, 15:00 min, Color, Stereo Sound | Sculptures: 3D printed PLA, plastic trash from the Mediterranean Sea, upcycled plastic mesh from land agriculture.
The Body as Threshold is a multimedia installation consisting of an experimental CGI film and sculptural elements. Drawing on Judith Butler’s notion of violence as a force field - diffuse, structuring, and entangled with grief - and on Thom van Dooren and Deborah Bird Rose’s understanding of extinction as an ongoing collapse, the work explores layered relationships between bodies, materials, and systemic harm.
The film unfolds within a speculative digital landscape: an island shaped by the entanglement of land, species, and waste. Albatrosses and plastic debris inhabit this collapsing ecology, where gestures of care become fatal, and where contamination and survival are tightly knotted. A flying camera navigates this oceanic garbage patch, revealing sites where violence, disrupted temporalities, and the breakdown of “coherent” narratives emerge.
The installation invites viewers to confront the interdependence and precarity of the more-than-human world. Mourning is not positioned as an endpoint, but as an ethical stance - a first gesture toward reconfiguring how we grieve, love, and remain accountable in the face of ongoing loss.
Scattered throughout the space are sculptural seating forms filled with plastic waste collected in collaboration with a collective from Menorca - materials akin to those found in the stomachs of dead seabirds. These sculptures act as both ergonomic supports and conceptual tricksters: they welcome the body while confronting it with the weight of complicity. They offer spaces to sit, pause, and stay with the trouble - making grief tangible, relational, and shared.
Supported by Academy of Media Arts Cologne
Images © Amelie Vierbuchen
