DANSE SERPENTINE

Video and textile Installation, YONO Gallery, Santiago, Chile, 2012

Danse Serpentine continues my research into haptic perception, the materiality of projected images, and early optical and cinematic technologies, including magic lanterns and phantasmagoria.

The installation incorporates the Lumière brothers’ Danse serpentine, filmed in the late 1890s and inspired by the celebrated stage performance created by Loïe Fuller. Originally shot in black and white, the fabric was subsequently coloured by hand, frame by frame. The moving textile thus became both the subject of the film and the surface through which colour and projected light acquired form.

In my installation, two simultaneous projections of the film encounter suspended, mobile textile surfaces. As the fabrics move, the image is fragmented, doubled, folded, and superimposed. Light leaves the stability of the screen and becomes spatial and material, producing a continuously changing choreography between projected image and physical textile.

The spectator encounters the work not only visually, but bodily: by moving through the installation and altering their position in relation to its translucent surfaces, projections, shadows, and reflections. Rather than functioning as a fixed cinematic image, the film expands into a tactile and spatial event.

Conceived for a one-day exhibition at the artist-run Galería Yono, Danse Serpentine responded to the temporary format through a transportable and non-permanent intervention. Its provisional arrangement allowed image, fabric, light, and spectatorship to come together as a fleeting spatial composition.