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25 February 2023 - 2 April 2023
EXHIBITION | Mud and Sticky Band: An Awakening by Natalia Sorzano
EXHIBITION | Mud and Sticky Band: An Awakening
By Natalia Sorzano
Finissage: 01 April
Exhibition Dates: 25th February - 2nd of April
In Natalia Sorzano’s solo-exhibition, she brings sculptural band members of Mud and Sticky Band to life in a musical installation. Created from the remains of pop cultural waste, these contaminated creatures are the result of her ongoing research which so far resulted in textured collages, a sound piece, musical scores and performances. In Mud and Sticky Band: An Awakening, the full band comes together to play Natalia’s musical research exploring desire and intuition.
“Getting lost still takes us somewhere, so here we go again then…”
Wherever you go, you’ll encounter the remains of mass consumption. Candy wrappers and fake eye-lashes on the sidewalk in your street or a bag washing ashore thanking you for shopping. Natalia Sorzano wonders if, considering the current circumstances and the urgency to change our consumption habits, our relationship to objects and space will change. What if we take what is reachable at hand and start to create from these contaminated resources?
Natalia wandered through natural and urban locations around the Netherlands to explore desire through sound, texture, movement and shape. Taking Sara Ahmed’s Orientations: Toward a Queer Phenomenology as an instruction manual, she developed an embodied research that included methods such as the intuitive collection of objects (matter) and their re-organization; sound recordings of landscapes and bodily encounters; texture rubbings of cruising urban spots; notations of how body movements and choreographs are instigated by space and matter; descriptions of the environment; conversations with friends and students. With the collection of trash and natural remains she found along her field visits, she began to merge materials and combined them with a.o. sticks, cement, foam, latex and tape with mainstream beauty industry items, such as long nails and hair extensions. These hybrid experimentations led wonky monsters to emerge. She started to see these figures as dissident characters, their eroticism and stubbornness inspired her to form a band. Mud and Sticky Band.
(Pop)Music and sound have always been part of Natalia’s work. She uses these mediums to address material in less linear manners, allowing her intuition to move beyond rationality. To challenge herself to practice a similar intuitive approach towards material objects and space, she had to self-analyze in which ways her close environments and pop culture have influenced her desire and thus her relationship towards bodies, matter, space, sound and movement. By allowing the process to take its course, while reflecting on how desire serves as a mediator force between relations, Mud and Sticky Band emerged. Each sculptural band member started out as a paper collage which served as a study document on texture and shape. These collages are Natalia’s guiding tools for the making of the unique band members, they form their sounds and voices, their shapes, textures, personalities and attitudes. In addition to these collages, paintings are used as meditative scores for becoming and engaging erotically with other bodies and matter, such as a score on how to swallow fire or a score on how to have a sexual encounter with a cactus. Through the immersive sound installation as a binding element of the exhibition her research, collages and paintings come together forming Mud and Sticky Band.
The exhibition 'Mud and Sticky Band: An Awakening' will run from 24th of February till the 2nd of April. In May Roodkapje is joining hands with O. (the festival formerly known as Operadagen) to further expand the sound installation into a full live performance. This performance will be on Saturday 20, Sunday 21 and Tuesday 23 of May in Roodkapje. On Saturday the performance will be followed by a slimey afterparty.
Finissage 01 April
Come by for the finissage of
‘Mud and Sticky Band: An Awakening’
including an artist talk between artist Natalia Sorzano and Roodkapje director/curator Marloes de Vries
followed by a live program with music and interactive visuals by WITH/AND + WETWORK
19:30 Doors
20:00 Artist talk
21:00 Live music
ABOUT NATALIA
Natalia is a mixed media artist based between Bogotá (Colombia) and Rotterdam, working primarily with/through mixed media installations (video, sculpture, and painting), music, and performances to video. In her work she inquires how relations unfold in the different cultural tissues she inhabits. She does so by focusing her attention on the negotiation of belief systems, identity and histories in urban and rural landscapes. She is drawn to the formation of symbols embedded in these interactions and how they disguise interpretations of everyday life, violence, desire and politics. Folding these into her work, they lead her to create macabre and phantasmagoric re-imaginings of reality.
Natalia is co-founder of the facilitative platform GHOST, the artist-run community space/les university of life Tender Center Rotterdam, and a board member of the organization for Latinx trans and queer immigrants Papaya Kuir. She works as an educator at the WdKA in Rotterdam and has been a guest tutor in different academies in the Netherlands. In 2022 she was a member of Roodkapje’s Hamburger Community of Art.
Exhibition text by: Marloes de Vries
By Natalia Sorzano
Finissage: 01 April
Exhibition Dates: 25th February - 2nd of April
In Natalia Sorzano’s solo-exhibition, she brings sculptural band members of Mud and Sticky Band to life in a musical installation. Created from the remains of pop cultural waste, these contaminated creatures are the result of her ongoing research which so far resulted in textured collages, a sound piece, musical scores and performances. In Mud and Sticky Band: An Awakening, the full band comes together to play Natalia’s musical research exploring desire and intuition.
“Getting lost still takes us somewhere, so here we go again then…”
Wherever you go, you’ll encounter the remains of mass consumption. Candy wrappers and fake eye-lashes on the sidewalk in your street or a bag washing ashore thanking you for shopping. Natalia Sorzano wonders if, considering the current circumstances and the urgency to change our consumption habits, our relationship to objects and space will change. What if we take what is reachable at hand and start to create from these contaminated resources?
Natalia wandered through natural and urban locations around the Netherlands to explore desire through sound, texture, movement and shape. Taking Sara Ahmed’s Orientations: Toward a Queer Phenomenology as an instruction manual, she developed an embodied research that included methods such as the intuitive collection of objects (matter) and their re-organization; sound recordings of landscapes and bodily encounters; texture rubbings of cruising urban spots; notations of how body movements and choreographs are instigated by space and matter; descriptions of the environment; conversations with friends and students. With the collection of trash and natural remains she found along her field visits, she began to merge materials and combined them with a.o. sticks, cement, foam, latex and tape with mainstream beauty industry items, such as long nails and hair extensions. These hybrid experimentations led wonky monsters to emerge. She started to see these figures as dissident characters, their eroticism and stubbornness inspired her to form a band. Mud and Sticky Band.
(Pop)Music and sound have always been part of Natalia’s work. She uses these mediums to address material in less linear manners, allowing her intuition to move beyond rationality. To challenge herself to practice a similar intuitive approach towards material objects and space, she had to self-analyze in which ways her close environments and pop culture have influenced her desire and thus her relationship towards bodies, matter, space, sound and movement. By allowing the process to take its course, while reflecting on how desire serves as a mediator force between relations, Mud and Sticky Band emerged. Each sculptural band member started out as a paper collage which served as a study document on texture and shape. These collages are Natalia’s guiding tools for the making of the unique band members, they form their sounds and voices, their shapes, textures, personalities and attitudes. In addition to these collages, paintings are used as meditative scores for becoming and engaging erotically with other bodies and matter, such as a score on how to swallow fire or a score on how to have a sexual encounter with a cactus. Through the immersive sound installation as a binding element of the exhibition her research, collages and paintings come together forming Mud and Sticky Band.
The exhibition 'Mud and Sticky Band: An Awakening' will run from 24th of February till the 2nd of April. In May Roodkapje is joining hands with O. (the festival formerly known as Operadagen) to further expand the sound installation into a full live performance. This performance will be on Saturday 20, Sunday 21 and Tuesday 23 of May in Roodkapje. On Saturday the performance will be followed by a slimey afterparty.
Finissage 01 April
Come by for the finissage of
‘Mud and Sticky Band: An Awakening’
including an artist talk between artist Natalia Sorzano and Roodkapje director/curator Marloes de Vries
followed by a live program with music and interactive visuals by WITH/AND + WETWORK
19:30 Doors
20:00 Artist talk
21:00 Live music
ABOUT NATALIA
Natalia is a mixed media artist based between Bogotá (Colombia) and Rotterdam, working primarily with/through mixed media installations (video, sculpture, and painting), music, and performances to video. In her work she inquires how relations unfold in the different cultural tissues she inhabits. She does so by focusing her attention on the negotiation of belief systems, identity and histories in urban and rural landscapes. She is drawn to the formation of symbols embedded in these interactions and how they disguise interpretations of everyday life, violence, desire and politics. Folding these into her work, they lead her to create macabre and phantasmagoric re-imaginings of reality.
Natalia is co-founder of the facilitative platform GHOST, the artist-run community space/les university of life Tender Center Rotterdam, and a board member of the organization for Latinx trans and queer immigrants Papaya Kuir. She works as an educator at the WdKA in Rotterdam and has been a guest tutor in different academies in the Netherlands. In 2022 she was a member of Roodkapje’s Hamburger Community of Art.
Exhibition text by: Marloes de Vries
