Homo Sapiens sapiens 5 wings, Pipilotti Rist's dream

Lion,

Born in 1962, in the Swiss town of Grabs, as Elisabeth Charlotte Rist, Pipilotti Rist created her stage name from the fusion between a family nickname and Pippi Longstocking, the fictional character created by the writer Astrid Lindgren, who somehow anticipates certain characteristics of his creations. Trained in graphic design and audiovisual creation in Vienna and Basel, she is a fundamental figure in video art in the last four decades and her videos and installations are distinguished by a personal aesthetic: a conjunction of pop culture, technology and sexuality, saturated tones and fantasy. Based on these features, she proposes a reflective approach to everyday experience and the inherited conventions linked to femininity, adding evident notes of humor.

Rist began his research in the mid-eighties, linking his forays into the audiovisual world with musical ones; For several years, he was part of the experimental postpunk group Les Reines Prochaines. Already in the nineties he consolidated his production in the field of video art, soon achieving important international recognition thanks to the sensual and ironic nature of his pieces, his rare poetry and his ability to transmit subtle bodily sensations. She has precisely made video the basis of her language due to the similarities that, in her opinion, the quality of its image reveals with respect to the subconscious: she is not so much interested in capturing reality as in alluding to the structure of thought, in which They superimpose smells, memories, sensations… To achieve this effect, they use low-resolution tapes and even machines that produce distortions similar to those that the human body would experience in our memory. The chromatic saturation of her creations also responds to the desire to be faithful to the physical perception of the world, and the music, composed by her alone or in collaboration with Anders Guggiberg, represents, in her words, almost half of her time. elaboration that their videos entail.

It is part of the MUSAC funds Homo Sapiens sapiens 5 wingsa work that the Swiss woman presented in 2005 at the Venice Biennale (as Homo Sapiens sapiens) and that the following year could be seen, in a new version, in the Leonese museum itself in the individual exhibition “Pröblemäs büenös. 4 works by Pipilotti Rist and friends.” As part of the Biennale, the work was projected onto the vaulted ceilings of the baroque church of San Stae located on the Venetian Grand Canal, so that, to be seen, the public had to lie down on mattresses arranged on the floor, composing a vine leaf The content of the recording (landscapes, psychedelic colors, naked nymphs, images that seemed to be constructed and deconstructed in a kaleidoscopic manner) suggested a paradise lost on the roof of this temple, imagined halfway between dreamism and spatial experimentation.

In the León exhibition, the montage was necessarily different: that Garden of Eden sprung from the artist's subconscious was displayed on five hanging screens. In the background was the music that usually converges with her visual narratives: a hypnotic soundtrack that Rist had composed in collaboration with the aforementioned Anders Guggisberg.

Now this work reopens one of the private spaces of the MUSAC, whose architecture is the work of Tuñón and Mansilla: it is Room 6, a very original gallery due to its very high height, 18 meters. Its presentation is accompanied by that of another installation by Rist in Room 5, Apple Tree Innocent on Diamond Hill (2003), made under the influence of Fluxus and Yoko Ono and related to the series Innocent Collection, which began in 1985 collecting pieces of translucent plastic, among others, in which there is no color impression, assuming this as an intentional gesture against the current of consumerism that tends towards vivid chromaticism to trap us. In this case, these elements hang from the branch of a tree and are contrasted with videographic scenes of a coastal landscape filmed at twilight, underlining the double effect of the shadows of the objects and the soft light of the sun.

The furniture that we see in the rooms has also been designed by this author, with the intention that it favors the sound and visual immersion of the audience and stimulates all of their senses through suggestion.