TERESA COS • Inanimate Beings Also Have Finite Lives
Teresa Cos with great care and dedication and through acquired interdisciplinary education and personal nomadic experience which gave her insight into different mental and physical geographies of certain territories develops an artistic practice that explores and questions spaces and relationships between individual and global using various media. Through moving and non-moving images, sound and music, diagrams and maps inspired by specific events and people Teresa in her works talks about some kind of absurd, hypnotic repetition of socio-political concepts and theirs impacts on the nothingness in everyday life. By creating a discrete cacophony in the eye and ear of the observer, marking the nothingness, she opens the space for creating new frequencies of life. Nothingness is not eternal and it does not mean absence, but infinite plentitude of openness.
Curated by Zorana Đaković Minniti
List of the exhibited works in the order in which they will be discovered in the gallery space:
Tunnel Boring Machine (2019)
Four-channel 2K video, colour, sound, 20 min
This is a performance-film shot on an action camera fixed on Teresa’s chest, while she was walking twice and in opposite direction the entire length of a Eurostar train crossing the channel, during a return trip from Brussels to London on the weekend of the 2019 European elections. The work is presented as a multi-channel video installation surrounded by a sound composition, where the recordings of contact microphones applied to the window of Teresa’s passenger seat are modulated in pitch along the geological cross-section of the euro tunnel.
The Measure of Disorder (2018)
Two-channel full HD video, colour, sound, 41 min
The video follows the trail of Austrian scientist Ludwig Boltzmann (1844-1906), who is known not only for his groundbreaking findings into the phenomenon of entropy but also for his tragic suicide in the village of Duino, not far from the Adriatic city of Trieste, in the region where Teresa Cos grew up. The work makes a non-linear reconstruction of Boltzmann’s last train journey, from Vienna to the “Austrian Riviera”, across the Alps and the territories of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
Entropy, chaos, probability and time reversibility, which are some of the concepts Boltzmann helped theorize, guide the image and the sound edit throughout the work. The emblematic ride layers histories and territories of past and present Europe. Improvisation and repetition function as triggers for the eruption of private and collective memories, across oceans and timelines.
The images bear no dialogue and the effect is brought in by an evocative soundtrack composed of fragments of
train sound and samples of Tony Bennett’s “This Funny World”. Playing with the conventions
of the cinema, personal anecdotes intertwine with ‘grand’ socio-political movements. Thus, The Measure of Disorder offers a reflection on the human perception of the concept of time, memory and the (ir)reversibility of things happening.
Moore’s Law (2022)
60 x 15 sec 320×240 px video clips, filtered through Instagram Stories “Mirror” effect, randomised loop playback
Moore’s Law (2022)
60 x 15 sec 320×240 px video clips, filtered through Instagram Stories “Light Leak II” effect, randomised loop playback
Cicale, Cicale (2022)
Stereo sound, loop
On the Relationship Between Entropy and Meaning in Music
B&W laser print on newsprint, 21 x 29,7 cm
The Arrow of Time
B&W laser print on newsprint, 21 x 29,7 cm
Tunnel Boring Machine (score)
B&W laser print on newsprint, 21 x 29,7 cm
Moore’s Law (score)
B&W laser print on newsprint, 21 x 29,7 cm
(untitled)
B&W laser print on newsprint, 21 x 29,7 cm
About the artist
Teresa Cos was born in Latisana, Friuli-Venezia Giulia, Italy. She lives in London.
Teresa Cos is an artist exploring the processes of memory and repetition underlying history, society and human psychology. Her interdisciplinary practise encompasses film, sound and video installation, visual scoring, experimental music composition and performance.
Teresa has presented and performed her work in various international contexts including Cafe Oto, OGR- Officine Grandi Riparazioni Torino, 3rd Industrial Art Biennial, Argos Centre for Audiovisual Arts, WIELS Contemporary Art Centre, Casino Luxembourg, bb15, Q-O2, Fondazione Baruchello, Kanal-Centre Pompidou, The Mac – Metropolitan Arts Centre Belfast, Les Ateliers Claus, Centrale Fies, Careof, Mostyn Gallery and the 14th Venice International Architecture Biennial among others.
She has taken part in several international residency programs, including WIELS, Jan Van Eyck Academy, Q-21 Museum Quartier Vienna, Visio-European Programme on Artists’ Moving Images and the Botín Foundation workshop with Tacita Dean.
Her debut album “Week Nine”, made in collaboration with Julia E Dyck and Caroline Profanter, is released on Takuroku/Café Oto, London.
Teresa holds a Master’s degree in Architecture from the University IUAV of Venice and a Master of Arts in Documentary Photography from UAL-London College of Communication.
www.teresacos.com