Martina Menegon

ARTICLE: A CLOSER LOOK AT MARTINA MENEGON'S WHEN YOU ARE CLOSE TO ME I SHIVER

Martina Menegon, when I am close to you I shiver, installation shot by Georg Mayer, MAK, Museum of Applied Arts, Wien, 2020

MASS SUICIDE IN THE AGE OF CLIMATE EMERGENCY

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Currently exhibited on VRAL as a machinima, Martina Menegon’s when you are close to me I shiver was originally conceived as a live simulation. Presented as an installation featuring tablets, large screens, and an immersive soundscape designed by Alexander Martzin, when you are close to me I shiver is a multimedia experience bringing together the artist’s key concerns: the body as a site of conflict, self-representation as a political act, and climate change. Menegon imagines a future where humankind is close to extinction, a realistic outcome considering half a century of complete dismissal of climate change by the worlds’ governments. In this live simulation, the world is completely submerged by water, like in a Ballardian nightmarescape.

The survivors converge on a small island to die. Naked and vulnerable, they simply wait for the inevitable end. Such a scenario is both uncanny and familiar: after all, it was inspired by a powerful scene in David Attenborough’s Our Planet (2019) depicting more than 100,000 moribund walruses as they gather onto a small stretch of coast in Northern Russia in 2017 (“20 kilometers of a never ending walrus gathering”, as scientist Anatoly Cochnev described it). Some of the most graphic scenes show walruses falling from cliffs, evoking the image of a “falling man” jumping to his death as New York’s Twin Towers were about to crumble. The walrus gather on this place because of the melting ice in the Arctic: having nowhere to go, they choose death…

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Matteo Bittanti

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EVENT: MARTINA MENEGON (SEPTEMBER 30 - AUGUST 13 2022, ONLINE)

when you are close to me I shiver

video recording of live simulation

digital video/machinima (1920 x 1080), color, sound, 7’ 47”, 2020, Italy

Created by Martina Menegon

Sound design by Alexander Martinz

when you are close to me I shiver is an algorithmically controlled live simulation, hereby presented as a video recording, that is, a real-time generated virtual experience that takes place in a version of the future in which humans, out of desperation, gather in masses on the last remaining piece of land. Inspired by the walrus scene in the documentary Our Planet narrated by David Attenborough and produced by Silverback Films, the project proposes a scenario encompassing ongoing environmental and personal crises. The video depicts a desolated island populated by 3D-scanned clones of the artist herself. Through these perceivable avatars, the artist creates a new identity that arises out of plurality, proprioceptively renegotiating the fragility of both the physical and the virtual self and its realities.

Martina Menegon (Italy, 1988) is an artist working predominantly with Interactive and Extended Reality Art. In her works, Martina creates intimate and complex assemblages of physical and virtual elements that explore the contemporary self and its phygital corporeality. She experiments with the uncanny and the grotesque, the self and the body and the dialogue between physical and virtual realities, to create disorienting experiences that become perceivable despite their virtual nature.

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