Part automated system, part moving image, Nathalie Gebert’s Anthofluid is a sculptural device that generates an ephemeral pictorial proposition at regular intervals. Using medical tubing, the assembly of transparent wafers that form its surface is gradually filled with a purplish liquid. A micro-controlled electromechanical system is then activated to transmit electrical impulses, arbitrarily distributed over the surface covered with electrical receptors. Each pulse then results in a chemical reaction that tints the liquid with a dual green and red hue, slowly mixing and fading to violet. The liquid is in fact a fluid solution of anthocyanin, a water-soluble natural plant pigment. The whole process refers to the hydrofeminist perspective – notably via the theories of Canadian researcher Astrida Neimanis – which reflects on the question of identity and corporeity through the aqueous lens. Underlying this is the idea of ‘becoming a body of water’, and thus a fluid, unstable and indeterminate body. An adaptable body with undefined, flexible contours that has the capacity to incorporate and become incorporated into its environment. Anthofluid also resonate with the ‘new materiality’ movement, a current of contemporary philosophy that emerged in the 1990s (in the wake, among others, of the research of feminist philosopher Rosi Braidotti) and which, in particular, calls into question the human/non-human, nature/culture duality. Indeed, Gebert’s work thwarts this opposition by the enhancement of the invasive dimension of water, as well as by diverting the Cartesian expectations suggested by its almost industrial materiality and the exactitude of its operational mechanics: the methodical electrical impulse transmitted to a precise point on the grid is instantly transmuted into volatile volutes, definitively escaping the rational logic that precedes it. The principle of dissolution becomes one of becoming.

 

Nathalie Gebert – Anthofluid