Stuff for Every World/Dream, Baby, Dream
So look: the beauty in the most foul, the foulness in the most beautiful, and say: Hello.
People chase or hug their shadows. The mountains have mouths and eyes, the beach can also see. A fly leads you silently through Eva Pedroza's website like a transient breeze and rests where your gaze falls. Bitter faces on strange bodies act in ways you don't understand. The loving look of a woman falls on a face of mud ... is it really a woman? Nothing is what it appears, but the appearance catches your gaze, you cannot look away. To answer your questions, you will have to immerse yourself in worlds that only raise more questions - unless you acquire the ability to let contradictions exist, perhaps even to enjoy them. It takes courage, because your gaze will also inevitably fall on the darkest corners of existence, which society demands we displace into the deepest corners of our consciousness - sacrificing the richness of a diversity that, even beyond existing social structures, illuminates further worlds and world perceptions. Somewhere in all of us there must be a longing to accept all things without bias or prejudice, just as they stand to each other. This longing - paired with the reflexive urge for explanation and order - is, I suspect, the inherently contradictory reason why our gaze remains fixed on Eva Pedroza's worlds.
Can there be universally valid laws that contradict each other and yet exist simultaneously in peace and beauty? Why does the abysmally repulsive emanate a promising attraction - and why does the infinitely attractive repel us so abysmally?
A kind of paralysis of dualistic worldviews, of entrenched thought patterns, is triggered by Pedroza's imaginative, dreamlike images. Running macabrely, and at the same time lovingly, as the red thread throughout her works -which one looks for like a dog looking for a stick-, it turns them into an invitation to think differently, to feel differently, to question conventions, as Pedroza herself says in an interview with Beate Scheder.
In the animated video installations Vogelmenschen (2016) and Welten der Welt (2017), Eva Pedroza also unhinges dualistic thought structures. She creates a place detached from space and time, located somewhere beyond good and evil, beyond ugly and beautiful. It’s as if you have landed in the mysterious Red Room in David Lynch's Twin Peaks, like the lead investigator Special Agent Cooper. Pedroza’s world is both creepy and promising, irrational and, on a deeper level, so much more understandable than anything explicable. Human heads made of modelling clay are transformed into birds and reverted back again, by loops running forwards and backwards. Landscapes and living beings melt and emerge anew, like the phoenix from the ashes, from their own liquid. An animated plasticine bird whispers the words taken from my play Welt der Taumler (2015): Pssssst, ich hab Stoff für alle Welten der Welt, in welche willst du? (Pssssst, I have stuff for every world of this world, which one do you choose?) and eventually starts the soundtrack of it’s own transformation: Dream, Baby, Dream ... it sings, while it, like everything around it, liquifies within seconds.
In the animated video installation Wortgeschwader (2016) Pedroza plays the same game with space, time and language. From an interview by Julian Spaan and Daniel Sigge with Harry Hass, the founder of the Berlin bar Ex'n'Pop, where artists such as Nick Cave or Einstürzende Neubauten held court, Pedroza takes fragments of conversations and loops and repeats them in such a way that they become ambiguous or abstracted from their original meaning, revealing themselves as pure word shells: Politics! Politics! Politics! Politics! ... Politics is a difficult thing. We rarely talked about politics back then. Most of us were actually artists. Many are dead.
What is language? And to what extent do we create and control through it our own and thus a collective perception of place and time?
The questions raised by Pedroza's works through their grotesque world drawing and atmosphere make them highly political on a subtle level. They depict possibilities which some part of each of us long for, in a society that compulsively has to standardize everything - the body, the material, the soul. Worlds that are neither pure nor dirty, but both at the same time and therefore beyond both. Eva Pedroza's works exist in a realm where good and evil become irrelevant, they capture a state that simply is what it is, beyond judgement - and in this they are one thing above all: liberating.
Fanny Sorgo
Stuff for Every World/Dream, Baby, Dream
So look: the beauty in the most foul, the foulness in the most beautiful, and say: Hello.
People chase or hug their shadows. The mountains have mouths and eyes, the beach can also see. A fly leads you silently through Eva Pedroza's website like a transient breeze and rests where your gaze falls. Bitter faces on strange bodies act in ways you don't understand. The loving look of a woman falls on a face of mud ... is it really a woman? Nothing is what it appears, but the appearance catches your gaze, you cannot look away. To answer your questions, you will have to immerse yourself in worlds that only raise more questions - unless you acquire the ability to let contradictions exist, perhaps even to enjoy them. It takes courage, because your gaze will also inevitably fall on the darkest corners of existence, which society demands we displace into the deepest corners of our consciousness - sacrificing the richness of a diversity that, even beyond existing social structures, illuminates further worlds and world perceptions. Somewhere in all of us there must be a longing to accept all things without bias or prejudice, just as they stand to each other. This longing - paired with the reflexive urge for explanation and order - is, I suspect, the inherently contradictory reason why our gaze remains fixed on Eva Pedroza's worlds.
Can there be universally valid laws that contradict each other and yet exist simultaneously in peace and beauty? Why does the abysmally repulsive emanate a promising attraction - and why does the infinitely attractive repel us so abysmally?
A kind of paralysis of dualistic worldviews, of entrenched thought patterns, is triggered by Pedroza's imaginative, dreamlike images. Running macabrely, and at the same time lovingly, as the red thread throughout her works -which one looks for like a dog looking for a stick-, it turns them into an invitation to think differently, to feel differently, to question conventions, as Pedroza herself says in an interview with Beate Scheder.
In the animated video installations Vogelmenschen (2016) and Welten der Welt (2017), Eva Pedroza also unhinges dualistic thought structures. She creates a place detached from space and time, located somewhere beyond good and evil, beyond ugly and beautiful. It’s as if you have landed in the mysterious Red Room in David Lynch's Twin Peaks, like the lead investigator Special Agent Cooper. Pedroza’s world is both creepy and promising, irrational and, on a deeper level, so much more understandable than anything explicable. Human heads made of modelling clay are transformed into birds and reverted back again, by loops running forwards and backwards. Landscapes and living beings melt and emerge anew, like the phoenix from the ashes, from their own liquid. An animated plasticine bird whispers the words taken from my play Welt der Taumler (2015): Pssssst, ich hab Stoff für alle Welten der Welt, in welche willst du? (Pssssst, I have stuff for every world of this world, which one do you choose?) and eventually starts the soundtrack of it’s own transformation: Dream, Baby, Dream ... it sings, while it, like everything around it, liquifies within seconds.
In the animated video installation Wortgeschwader (2016) Pedroza plays the same game with space, time and language. From an interview by Julian Spaan and Daniel Sigge with Harry Hass, the founder of the Berlin bar Ex'n'Pop, where artists such as Nick Cave or Einstürzende Neubauten held court, Pedroza takes fragments of conversations and loops and repeats them in such a way that they become ambiguous or abstracted from their original meaning, revealing themselves as pure word shells: Politics! Politics! Politics! Politics! ... Politics is a difficult thing. We rarely talked about politics back then. Most of us were actually artists. Many are dead.
What is language? And to what extent do we create and control through it our own and thus a collective perception of place and time?
The questions raised by Pedroza's works through their grotesque world drawing and atmosphere make them highly political on a subtle level. They depict possibilities which some part of each of us long for, in a society that compulsively has to standardize everything - the body, the material, the soul. Worlds that are neither pure nor dirty, but both at the same time and therefore beyond both. Eva Pedroza's works exist in a realm where good and evil become irrelevant, they capture a state that simply is what it is, beyond judgement - and in this they are one thing above all: liberating.
Fanny Sorgo