Andrea Otoya Covelli

 

Motel Desire: As I enter the house, a two-meter-tall woman stands in a fresh and sexy pose, sporting black, shiny, leather lingerie, and holding a bunch of ringlets of hair up. With a full-face of make-up and an evocative gaze, she hangs as the centerpiece of the living room, right above a cherry red staircase.

 

She remains a forgotten living room trophy among dusty furniture and decorations left behind by the previous owner. I am shocked at how bare she lays for the whole world to see. As the day goes on, this painting does not leave my mind. Who is she? Is she someone real or an invented character? What was her relationship to the man who owned the house?

I wonder how to bring this character out into the world and place her somewhere beyond those living room walls. I become curious about her role as a fantastical being which represents a specific form of Latin American male desire.

 

There’s certain similarities in physical appearance between her and me. We slowly merge with each other as I bring my idea of her to life through my own body. I do this by filming the two of us in situations that have to do with my daily routines as well as my own clichéd ideas of places where I could encounter her. Through this activity, strong memories of being objectified resurface.

 

Out of this experience I weave a new narrative that becomes a navigational tool among the murky territory of fantasy, feeling and remembering.

 

Referencing digital platforms that incentivize self-commodification, this footage can only be accessed through screens that activate through payment. This is an attempt at constructing my own transactional environment within the exhibition space, questioning what it means to willingly expose oneself, while maintaining some degree of autonomy over my image.

 

Hyperflesh:

 

Throughout this work, I return to a recurring question within my research: what is a body for? I question how value is assigned through physical appearance and how the body is shaped for public consumption. Oversized inflatable spheres circulate through the space as playful sculptural bodies to be touched, moved, and activated by visitors. Covered in synthetic stretch fabrics and screen-printed with luxury brand patterns associated with narco aesthetics, the works reference what I describe as the pneumatic body, a hyper-feminized voluptuous body shaped by plastic surgery and male desire. These inflated bodies oscillate between playground and commodity.

 

Hypertext: Interested in the body as a raw material that can be monetized, I create an online narrative in the form of a loop of jacquard weave viewers themselves use their body to observe/consume content through an act of analog scrolling. Borrowing from Byung Chul Han’s notions in the “Transparency Society”, this work references today’s massive production of images and extreme self-disclosure as a form of homogenized erasure.

 

The pneumatic body, a term used throughout the dystopian novel 'Brave New World' by Aldous Huxley, describes desirable female bodies. You will see the pneumatic body represented in this work, which comes about during the rise of narcotrafficking in my home country of Colombia in the 80’s. Pornography in the United States and pop culture play a crucial role to impose the hour-glass shape beauty standard, which is then reproduced and exaggerated through plastic surgery and displayed as the beauty standard to follow. I explore how this body-type, once shaped by male desire, is now a powerhouse of online businesses. I believe we exist in an era of cyber-self-commodification, where the one last piece of property and resource to tap into if all else fails is our own body.

Hypertext brings a hand-operated conveyor belt which transports a ten-meter weave of images. This weave is made in a jacquard loom which has an early relationship with computers. Jacquard looms revolutionized the textile industry by working with punch cards to signal which threads should go up or down to weave an i.