TROPHIC
Installation
Technique: POLYESTER SPHERES, WATER BASED PAINT, CABLES
As an exercise of contemporary iconography, TROPHIC investigates the mutations of human communication systems. With a dose of irony, it follows the current relationship between the written language and the ideographic one.
TROPHIC, displayed in the exhibition space of the Carusel bookshop in Bucharest, is structured as a sculptural ideogram which prophesies in an almost dystopian way the abolition of the written word.
TROPHIC is inspired by the tension between the historical graphic communication methods and the emergence of new emotional alphabets.
It is a questioning of the written word power in an era of emoji and acronyms <LOL, WTF, YOLO>, of visually-encrypted messages that people send to each other via smart phones, or of the bots that convert text into voice messages and vice versa, thus saving the user from longer use of his own handwriting or voice.Are the emoji the new letters of an alphabet related to human affective dimension? Are the predefined voices and symbols of the operating systems a tendency of standardization and of acute emotional depersonalization?
Every year new ideograms are created and the existing ones are redefined, continuously adapting to new trends in graphics. The peach-emoji until recently used as a symbol for the derrière of a person has been corrected to remove the ambiguous connotations; then it was reintroduced to its original shape after a protest by users who overnight found themselves unable to suggest ideographically the idea of a someone’s bottom.
The live streaming websites broadcast in real time rape or suicide scenes, nonetheless celebrities like Kim Kardashian are ferociously criticised for exposing their naked bodies on magazine covers. The acts of terrorism are censored just enough to not see detached body parts, or internal organs. Meanwhile, the Lars von Trier’s Nimphomaniac part II is banned from the movie theatres for its sexually explicit scenes.
A so much oversized leaf that the cellular structure can be seen with the naked eye, or at least the interpretation of a cellular structure so small for the communication of the symbol itself, but vital for the biological existence. Behind this hyperbolized sculptural shape, the principles of ecology are intentionally hidden, with the ecosystem structures in which there is a permanent transfer of energy and matter, in order to keep cyclic feature of life. This energetic and material link between different species of a biocoenosis, defined in biology as the food chain (or the trophic chain), where some serve as energy producers (the plants) and others as consumers.
Hence the title, which introduces the first trophic level of one such chain that aims mainly to keep the balance in life and nature.
Suspended in the central space of the Carusel bookshop, the installation thus proposes a reflection on the anthropological implications of the use of iconography in order to synthesize the basic ideas of human emotional life.