Eduardo Navarro Explored

Eduardo Navarro, 'Octopia', 2016. Performance view.

Eduardo Navarro (Buenos Aires, 1979) attributes art the capacity to produce new possibilities of perception of the world around us. In his work, he confronts a diversity of organisms, studying them in an empiric form, in other words, through a sensible experience. While developing these approaches, Navarro recurs to various specialists (scientists, archeologists, athletes, spiritualists) with the idea of altering pre-established forms of conduct and behavior.

Navarro approaches each project as a new case study that enables him to investigate ways of thinking and expressions that are foreign to human perception. He has a profound interest in discovering how other organisms and elements think, feel, and perceive. The great challenge in this artistic practice, is to become that which is being investigated. In this way, Navarro proposes changes of situation, apparently absurd, which result in transformations that enable new understandings of the preset.

OCTOPIA,(2016) ), a project created for the Museo Tamayo, is the result of an investigation of the octopus, an animal whose intelligence derives from a complex nervous system that extends through its tentacles. For this project, Navarro has gathered 80 participants, including choreographers, dancers, and amateurs with the intention of generating a structure that is similar to an octopus, with a head that is operated by eight people and nine more participants extend throughout each tentacle. By gathering these groups of people the aim is to achieve a collective transformation in order to temporarily take the state of this animal, through an exploration of movement and corporal sensitivity.

With works often involving the participation of groups, Argentinian artist Eduarda Navarro uses art as a platform to explore and challenge social conditions and enviromental parameters. With a fantastic body of work behind him including sculpture, collage, performance and installation, it is no wonder he was named as ARTNews' 'Young Artists to Watch'.

His site-specific interactive installation at Sharjah Biennale in 2015 explored his interest in social organisation and alternative intelligence and affirmed that his work with groups of people in spaces, truly reflects the values of communication and thinking. His work XYZ (2015) is an original children’s activity that aims to reprogramme the mechanical and analytical skills used to win a game and in so doing make ‘winning’ once again a byproduct of play rather than its goal. Instead of imposing rules, the artist worked with children from local schools and clubs in Sharjah on colouring and meditation activities to develop the structure, resulting in a game that is most appropriately played with the exclusion of adults.

In XYZ, players roll an enormous ball in a gridded blue court. The ball’s movement is determined by nonvisual stimuli and guidance. The ball reveals its location by scent, sound or touch, represented by three different ‘jackets’ it wears. Each game is predetermined based on the sensory jacket used. Players, meanwhile, use applause to signal their locations on the court to each other. With its experiential, sensorial emphasis, XYZ accentuates the children’s mutual trust, concentration and collaboration.

Performance/Installation View - 'In collaboration with the Sun', 2017, Kling and Bang Gallery, Iceland. Image courtesy of the artist.

'In collaboration with the Sun' (2017) continues Navarro’s interest in the conversation between celestial and terrestrial worlds. For this work, Navarro has constructed seven golden suits with mirrored masks and geometrical mirrors for the hands to operate. They are worn by dancers who will reflect the sunlight into the surrounding space, using the movements of their bodies as human sundials. Activations will take place towards the end of the day as the sun descends, and on a clear day, typically sets Reykjavik aglow—directly hitting the city on an angle as the earth spins away from its rays. As the exhibition takes place in the autumn-to-winter months, the duration of daylight will change dramatically from the beginning to end of the exhibition—from nearly eleven hours at the start of the show to a mere four hours twenty minutes at the end. While the movements of the performers are choreographed by the sun, the suits will also guide the sun’s movements as they reflect its light into the exhibition space and also confuse the boundaries between inside and outside, daylight and artificial light, our earthly bodies and solar forms.