Virginia Spinelli

I choose “The little bird”, “interactive” CD. In it you can see: the instructions step by step of how to happily do a cloth bird. While you can hear: sad and almost ruthlessly, a “true” bird death story. The interactive in inverted commas, refers to a “modest interaction” that the work allows: get into it through any of its parts or steps, as if you follow the structure step by step (didactic way used for handicrafts teachings) it ends being a narration, or two (visual and sound) simultaneously in fragments. My intention, was to create a piece from the tension created between what you see and what you listen, between a missing, lack or absence (the bird death) and a supposed substitution or reparation (cloth bird construction). I choose this work, precisely because I think in the repair chances that we have (or not) through it, specially from art, (and not only in fiction), and how this repair intention, turns, many times, into absurd and almost (much more when different from us are involved) authoritarians or sadists. The little bird also has a strong sexual connotation,that in this case works like (I hope to) a humorist component in the piece. Production process: I worked text and images the most jointly and parallel way as possible. I assembled (with my sister Victoria, who is also the owner of the bird which dies in the story) a cloth bird and I exhaustive documented with photographs which I made a selection to create this short animations of every single step. While with the text (the hardest part for me) I asked for help. I thought, many ways to create it without having to write it myself. So finally I resolved it this way: I asked friends to write o to relate any story where a bird dies. So then I received (emails, related stories, etc) for example: Pepo the canary story, the death of other canaries without name caused by mysterious grains, among others. What I found out was that almost all the stories were related with child episodes and they all oscillated to innocence, tenderness and child cruelty. With those elements, editing all the examples, I created a version with an episode that happened when my sister and I were child.

With humor. I would like them to be read in group. I feel more interested in the idea of working the next piece for it to truly modify, the way of seeing the firsts pieces. My works are pretty much different between each other, (different means, thematics, formats, etc.). And I think them like discordant parts, that in one way they can form a group. I find continuity (almost a story) between them and I would like to the spectator could see this too.

Speaking about tradition, I feel identified with conceptualism. About my referents, most of them are contemporary, like Diena Aisemberg (among work) and many other who I feel interested with like: Hayao Miyazaki, Bruce Nauman, Loretta Lux, Raymond Pettibon, among others.

I choose: Victor Grippo's exhibition at Malba, the reconstruction of works like the one which the lead is exploded with seeds and a 30 years of work tour of one of the most significantly conceptual artist from Argentina, who allowed us (me) to to put him in the actual production context and see him like a clearly reference of it. Roberto Jacoby's Darkroom also in Malba, because, he putted in evidence a shared problematic for many contemporary works, because of its characteristics (for example that the performance is directed to only one spectator,who had to modify himself when changing from the gallery space to a museum space and adapt himself among other things, to the Malba's public, having a conflict with institutionalist's structures, like a museum, which force him to rethink the role that any of it parts of the work takes (artist, institution, spectators, etc.). Greek tragedy, Marina de Caro's work in Sendros Gallery. Because of the particular way that Marina transform materials, gives me a feeling related in a direct way so intimately and comfortably with her who creates that pleasant and happy works (in the nicest sense of the word).