2011 0001 camila sposati: submarine rescue signal

february 14 — march 19, 2011

Submarine Rescue Signal from 2002 is an early smoke piece by Brazilian artist Camila Sposati, featuring tropical scenery with colonial connotations invaded by intense hal­lu­ci­na­tory orange smoke. Recorded on 16 mm film in slow mo­tion the smoke takes on a heavy material substance that occasionally en­vel­ops the exotic idyll completely.
  Sposati uses brightly colored smoke to dramatically stage a particular land­scape or urban context. The color of the smoke carries its own material value with reference to a modernist tradition. Her smoke explosions are violent trans­for­ma­tive actions that seek to infect seemingly ordered systems with an ephem­er­al chaos. She works with smoke as the visuali­za­tion of chaos itself. Smoke gives visual form to gas as one of the four classical states of matter, which is char­ac­ter­ized by an ever changing, random structure. The constituent particles of smoke are able to move about freely and are therefore essentially unpredictable. As such, Sposati’s smoke performances celebrate high-level en­tro­py and instability as well as the transformational process that leads from one situation to another.

rescue submarine signal, 2003 from Camila Sposati.

Watch the video in fullscreen on → Vimeo.