SOFIA MORENO
Botched Garden of Earthly Delights - III Acts
Curated by Laura Brown, in collaboration with HOUSING NY
Oct 24 – Nov 7, 2021
Opening reception: Sunday, Oct 24, 6–9pm, live performance at 8pm

Appointments are required. Make one here. 

Act I - Dancer’s Reward
Sunday, October 24, 8pm, live at Participant Inc

Act II - Sleeping Hermaphroditus
Wednesday, October 27, 12-7pm, live at Participant Inc

Act III - The long-nosed god
Wednesday, November 3, 8pm EST, live-stream performance on participantafterdark.art 

Human decline is accelerating each day and will not recover. The reckless pace of our daily consumption and simultaneous quest to keep outdated ideas alive only serves to limit new forms of expression. Regardless, new and deformed knowledge will rise. Who are the predatory ones, the environmental villains? And who deserves to live in this toxic new mass habitat full of monsters, mermaids, and mythical hybrids?

PARTICIPANT INC debuts Sofia Moreno, Botched Garden of Earthly Delights - III Acts, an installation and performance series curated by Laura Brown in collaboration with HOUSING NY. A trans-noir experience of intimacy and pleasure, the exhibition unfolds and is ultimately realized through three interconnected live performances that speak to the erotic, the fantastical, and the spiritual. Staged in a dying landscape, each Act delivers stories of self-transformation from imagined pasts and futures. Moreno performs sacred anthropology—excavating a decade of footage, re-creating objects on-site, and burying personal relics from her archive. The works call upon personal mythologies and material histories, practices of gender, environmental terrorism, and the ancient roots of perversion. Moreno’s art confronts the violence of medical waste and industrial capitalism, and the fundamental relationship of those systems to her trans body.

ACT I: DANCER’S REWARD
Dancer’s Reward shapes the exhibition’s first night, leading the audience through a poly-visual narrative in which the artist’s life events are directly testified to through her live hand into the digital body and physical space. Live-mixing a decade of performance documentation and personal footage, the work traces the key phases of a Diva’s life and correlates them with a singular musical oeuvre. Through this combination of video, installation, movement, and sound, Moreno creates inter-medial digital Ghosts in a real-time, dream-like sequence. Dancer’s Reward references Aubrey Beardsley's illustration of the same name created in 1894 for the first British edition of Salomé, a violent and erotic dance whose legacy has shaped romantic and exploitative inequities that persist today. The resulting three-channel video projection will remain on view for the duration of the exhibition.

ACT II: SLEEPING HERMAPHRODITUS
Sleeping Hermaphroditus is a poem-like durational performance that makes reference to the 1620 lifesize marble sculpture of the same title by Gian Lorenzo Bernini. Moreno performs the fantasy of the statue, simultaneously fragmenting her body through the meta-image of live-feed cameras. The resulting installation superimposes the digital remnants of the performance onto its existing sculptural components. Rich in mythological references and symbols, Sleeping Hermaphroditus asks fundamental questions about our existence and meaning, especially when approached from outside of a Western ontological framework. 

ACT III: THE LONG-NOSED GOD
The long-nosed god draws upon Moreno’s poetics of migration, disturbing the past through the contemporary technologization of the flesh. Shifting from the durational nature of Act II, the performance is concerned with physical endurance and personal memories encoded through repetitive actions. Exaggerations and simplifications of those behaviors make objects take on new life. The long-nosed god is  situated within a soundscape that moves from the “classical” into a more experimental place that is at once colder and more guttural—maintaining grace through intensity.

CREDITS: Sound by Johanna Brock; Latex objects and clear plastic gloves by David Nasca; Glass adornments by Grace Wardlaw; Shoes by Sua Yoo.

Safety protocols: Appointments are required and are limited to four people. Visitors must wear a mask and practice social distancing. NYC requires visitors to be vaccinated against COVID-19 to enter.