Symbiotic Mimesis

Soundscape, installation, performance, 10 min, 2021

Cromwell Place, July 2021/ Weaving Worlds, UK Mexican Arts Society, August 2022

Longlisted for LUMEN Prize 2022

Symbiotic Mimesis is a project by the artist Paola Estrella in collaboration with Jared Bennett who is a musician, composer, and creative technician. Through speculative fiction, the installation explores both, the desire to be able to become invisible and the need to shine and stand out. Touching on adaptation, transformation, and camouflage concerning social behaviors, it presents a narrative that draws inspiration from magic realism.

The project consists of a small living room with interactive objects that react to a ten-minute soundscape through a series of light sequences. Every element of the room was designed to create a fictional environment of a human being who fantasises about living in the ocean. The artist performs in the installation narrating a story that reflects on ideas about pleasure, desire, and becoming. She wears a costume of a jellyfish that reacts to her heartbeat, her voice, and the soundscape, through a sequence of lights that change colour, rhythm, and intensity as the story is being told. The audio presents a story that reflects on the human experience and interspecies communication through an immersive composition that includes Chelo and experimental underwater sounds.

(Credits of the images to Wenxuan Wang, Jess May Fisher, and Olie Harrop)