As in the rest of Boudry / Lorenz's artistic work, with approaches that blur the boundaries between cinema, dance, installation, social sculpture or performance, they question historical narratives, revisiting common scenarios to recover marginalized or ignored readings, creating installations that rediscover and they give visibility to issues and situations that are blurred, forgotten or opaque before the usual prism of the dominant culture.
The proposal gives the building a voice that speaks about its first program and its colonial history relationship, in a song by Aérea Negrot. Inspired by queer clubs, the artist duo also created a set of platforms or stages made out of mirrors.
The Palacio de Cristal, with its transparent walls, was built for the General Exhibition of the Philippine Islands in 1887 with the aim of learning more about the life and culture of the inhabitants of the Philippines, a Spanish colony since the 16th century for more than three hundred years.
View of the exhibition Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz. Glass is my skin, 2022. Photograph by Annik Wetter
Inspired by queer clubs, the artist duo also created a set of platforms or stages made out of mirrors. Reflected on the surfaces, the Palace becomes a performer, appearing on stage in different, multiple, and dissipated ways. At certain times the platforms exhale smoke and render the transparent building entirely opaque.
In the installation, the smoke becomes an aesthetic tool for undermining the Palace’s transparency as a regime of visuality. It also connects to the density of the queer club, where individual bodies transform into one collective body while dancing. The platforms or stages don’t wait for us, we cannot enter them, their stairs are up in the air. They seem to be caught in a moment of stillness before continuing to dance, or taking off from the Palace’s floor. On the verge of movement, they become protagonists in this installation as well. The stages turn the Palacio de Cristal itself into a performer. The building enters the stages, slightly distorted, reflected by the mirrors.
View of the exhibition Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz. Glass is my skin, 2022. Photograph by Annik Wetter.
The proposal gives the building a voice that speaks about its first program and its colonial history relationship, in a song by Aérea Negrot. Inspired by queer clubs, the artist duo also created a set of platforms or stages made out of mirrors.
The Palacio de Cristal, with its transparent walls, was built for the General Exhibition of the Philippine Islands in 1887 with the aim of learning more about the life and culture of the inhabitants of the Philippines, a Spanish colony since the 16th century for more than three hundred years.
View of the exhibition Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz. Glass is my skin, 2022. Photograph by Annik Wetter
Inspired by queer clubs, the artist duo also created a set of platforms or stages made out of mirrors. Reflected on the surfaces, the Palace becomes a performer, appearing on stage in different, multiple, and dissipated ways. At certain times the platforms exhale smoke and render the transparent building entirely opaque.
In the installation, the smoke becomes an aesthetic tool for undermining the Palace’s transparency as a regime of visuality. It also connects to the density of the queer club, where individual bodies transform into one collective body while dancing. The platforms or stages don’t wait for us, we cannot enter them, their stairs are up in the air. They seem to be caught in a moment of stillness before continuing to dance, or taking off from the Palace’s floor. On the verge of movement, they become protagonists in this installation as well. The stages turn the Palacio de Cristal itself into a performer. The building enters the stages, slightly distorted, reflected by the mirrors.
View of the exhibition Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz. Glass is my skin, 2022. Photograph by Annik Wetter.
