(CHILL)OPHONE​

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Year: 

2021

 

Media;

Spray, acrylic and oil pastel on 10 wooden planks & a blue landline telephone hanging from the highest board;

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Dimensions:

1st plank: 185 x 20cm

The rest are each reduced in height by 5 cm

+ irregularly sized telephone.

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The work “(CHILL)OPHONE” (chill-your-phone/xylophone) is intended as a contribution to give awareness to mental health. It consists in 10 wooden planks and from the highest plank there’s a suspended landline phone, with its cable extended until it hits the floor. By representing a xylophone, I use a wordplay to create an analogy with what I propose to make the lives of digitally imprisoned minds healthier. How? 

 

In this work, a musical instrument is drawn in space - a xylophone. This instrument is composed by an ordered sequence that makes its percussion possible. Ten planks were painted in synchrony and organized according to a vanishing point, making the painting decontextualized from its spatial origin. Let’s take the following example: imagining this object as a 'bridge' to a musical event, picture yourself at a concert. What do you see around you?

The singer, the band, the orchestra.....and what about the audience? What are they looking at? Many will look not at the reality around them but at a screen; probably from a mobile phone. 

 

Over time, the human being has created and adapted to new technologies, making them indispensable necessities in daily life. Nevertheless, as in everything in life, there are advantages and disadvantages to this kind of dependency.

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One of the disadvantages stands out when we start enjoying our moments, our personal experiences, through an object - a phone. The real, face-to-face appreciation, the colours, the sound, the people...are replaced by a digital creation. We become a reader of our own biography instead of living it. We play the part of a spectator. By trying to experience the 5 senses digitally, we lose the ability to enjoy the truth. True happiness is linked to presence. The last decade has proven that we lack reality, we need to live in a world where we can touch, hug, kiss and love. I feel for the young people who accept the digital façade. I feel for the lives lost to desires/ambitions based on disguises of low self-esteem. I feel for those who depend on being “on-line” and do not know the pleasure of reading a good book, feeling the company of a friend, admiring a landscape view or simply appreciating a concert... 

 

Recently, the virtual era has devoured our tangible life; our perspective of reality has become based on a pixelated gaze in rgb colours. The digital experience has become a means to an end: the creation of our desired appearance/life, as an alternative to objective reality. But, if this construction seems to provide, at first sight, some degree of satisfaction, on the other hand (a less “democratic”, less prudent side), it allows the control and taking over of our insecure privacy by third parties. Just like the xylophone planks, we need others, like us, close to us, who make us have a purpose, who make this unstable and unpredictable world make sense - make music. If we see life as the drumsticks, we vibrate until the beat stops. My wish is for us to be able to live more “off-line” by trying to see and appreciate live moments again - with rhythm!

 

I want to be like the landline phone - unplugged. 

So...chill-your-phone!

 

 

Ana Malta | NUMPÁRA, June 2021