Alexandra Pirici is a Romanian artist and choreographer known for staging public actions, gestures, and sculptures that provoke re-assessments of historical narratives and civic space, nature, and digital imagery. Emphasising the role that collective presence can wield in addressing power structures – or at least making them known – Pirici, a trained dancer, frequently assembles groups of actors and performers into formations that she describes as live sculptures, which act, move, shift, and sing. Activated over long durations of time, these works, which span from minimal arrangements to complex live environments, are not conceived as singular events, but rather, as ongoing actions that unfold over times, with no linear narrative, no beginning nor end. Pirici’s new ongoing performative action Encyclopedia of Relations (2022) is hinged on embodiments of collective relations as seen in biology and botany, as they are in constant stages of reconfiguration. Taking inspiration from symbiotic and parasitic interactions between individuals, as well as those negotiated in more abstract types of relations – between humans and technology, rocks and waves, plants and animals – performers choose to move through space according to a set of possible actions, which can be infinitely combined and recombined. Reminiscent of a Surrealist “exquisite corpse” game, through the body, the natural world merges with that of the fantastic.
Madeline Weisburg
