Created from the remains of pop cultural waste, found objects and natural remains Mud and Sticky Band are a series of sculptures that together conform an object-based pop music band. Its music, movements and actions explore the relation between objects, bodies and spaces mediated by desire and intuition. These contaminated creatures are the result of her ongoing research which so far resulted in textured collages, a sound piece, paintings of musical scores, a sound installation and a performance piece.
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.
Text by: Marloes de Vries
Roodkapje Rotterdam (2023) as part of O, Opera and Theater festival of Rotterdam (2023)
Credits:
Accompaning performers: Fyn [sarafina] Paulina Bonita, Mariana Jurado, Lucija Gregov and Paloma Plantenga
This work was comissioned by O, Opera and Theater festival of Rotterdam and it was also supported by CBK Rotterdam and the Mondriaan Fonds.
The soundpiece was commissioned by curator Honey Kraiwee for the show Ancestral Fortunes at Showroom Mama (2021). It was mixed by Bergur Anderson.
Video documentation of the work made by Sol Archer
Images and video stills taken by Sol Archer
Special thanks to:
Fyn [sarafina] Paulina Bonita, Mariana Jurado, Lucija Gregov, Paloma Plantenga, Roodkapje and Marloes de Vries, Céline Wouters and Futura Resistenza.