Azul De Monte

My focus during this time at the residency will be to create a series of movements, songs and drawings around the ideas of promises (love promises, political promises, pinky promises, land promises, etc.) – with all of the associated gestures and resistance. The process will start by writing a short essay that will serve as a starting point for the other works to spring from.

Water elements in the shape of tears, drips, and sticky fluids will be present throughout the work as reminders of what is constantly transforming and slipping away. Water elements interest me, among other things, for their power of erosion, their own structures of time and their shape-shifting states of being. A tear connects our interiority with what is outside us. Before it evaporates, it reminds us of our physical boundaries by caressing our skin. It also creates a new space inside itself as it pushes the outside world to make room for itself between us and the world. A tear is a threshold in itself that lasts only for as long as its aqueous materiality allows, and you cannot tell at the end whether it is absorbed by our skin or the skin of the world, or both. Promises may imply a future transformation while not always guaranteeing it. Nevertheless, they imply a movement (even if that movement is the absence of any) at a particular time.

I will be researching these two elements, the materiality of water and the social implications of promises during my time at Saari, which coincides with the end of fall and the beginning of winter. Right before the water transforms into snow and as the New Year approaches with the pressure to promise ourselves all sorts of changes and goals.

I’m from Argentina, living and working in Berlin. I have a BA in Image and Sound Design from the University of Buenos Aires and an MA in Art Praxis from the Dutch Art Institute in the Netherlands. During my MA, I started developing my practice as video/reading/singing performances, while documenting the different processes through illustrations portraying a queer still nature. Throughout my work, I’ve been interested in modes of capture of the human and non-human body through technology, language and, most recently, through commodified aesthetics like cuteness. I am researching possible ways of resisting commodification by misusing this type of aesthetic, to explore whether it might hold potential for a more gentle and open way of relating with ourselves and the environment.

azuldemonte.com