Trade-Off - Breathless World

Across these veils, which are the pages of the chapter Las Meninas by Michel Foucault three characters interact, overlap, and infect one another:  the ‘princess’, from the painting Las Meninas by Velásquez, a Plague doctor and a dog that bears witness to the narrative unfolding before him. The princess appears as a self-generating creative force, often with a paintbrush in hand, the plague doctor is a harbinger of death. In this installation the two figures at times overlap and merge into a single entity, it is not always clear where one begins and the other ends.  The landscape in which this takes place depict mountain ranges that map the rise and fall of the pandemic, but equally refer to the Bubonic plague in the seventeenth century. In the night sky above float spacecrafts and astronauts, attached to the astronauts are the tubes and oxygen tanks needed for breathing.  Below the tumult, in the quiet depths, swim schools of salmon.