The Heart Atrophies

May You Live in Interesting Times @ La Biennale de Venezia
May 11 - November 24, 2019

Catala's installation The Heart Atrophies (2018–19), presented in the Arsenale, starts a new cycle of research. As elsewhere in his work, hi-tech and lo-fi technologies mingle, and high-concept ideas are explored in playful, accessible ways.

Four objects spell out the title of the work, each corresponding to one of four fields that the artist believes emotionally affect our habits. “The” printed on stanchion’s banner draws on architecture, recalling public spaces or rather non-spaces. “Heart” relates to advertising: inside a human-scale plexiglass hood a sequence of constantly-changing holograms of happy or sour hearts taking different shapes, ranging from medical illustrations to cartoon-like emojis. “A” is science, a silicon soft-robot letter that moves awkwardly and unpredictably, at the pace of an air-pump’s beat of inflation and deflation; and “Trophies” is fashion, three identical woolen hand-made style knitted sweaters with a trophy motif on the front, each one actually industrially fabricated to include the same imperfections. The contemporary equivalent of a medieval rebus, the work shows how humans have always been in a close, adaptive, flexible relation with the signs that surround them, as the artist observes:

“We create to our image: by that I mean that the communication platforms we now use everyday morph us in the way we wanted it to be. Technologies carry the promise of inherent transformations and we form a parasitic relationship with them. It’s particularly true of communication platforms. I believe that if a person from the middle ages was sent into today’s world, he or she would pick up on smart phone use in a week. The reverse is also true, if one of us was sent back to medieval times, he or she would adapt to communication ways immediately and forget all about our frantic habits.”