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my eyes are wild, my lips tight pressed


January 18–February 2 2020
ZÖNOTÉKA (Hobrechtstraße 54, 12047 Berlin)
Caterina Gobbi Solo Show 
Curated by Johanna Hardt
Produced witth Re_FORMA

part of Vorspiel / transmediale & CTM program



For my eyes are wild, my lips tight pressed, Caterina Gobbi presents a new installation examining the idea of nature as a cultural repository of norms and moralism. Through sound, sculpture and video, she creates an environment where material investigations encounter voices, field recordings, electronic music samples, and performative gestures. In her approach, Caterina draws on queer ecology to reimagine cultural binaries that divide the natural from the unnatural, the human from the non-human. Challenging how discourses on nature legitimise and enforce heteronormativity, her layered storytelling combines fragments of media coverage with personal memories and fictive elements, interweaving tales of variability in species, with a focus on non-human sexual and gender diversity. The sounds in the exhibition are as much affecting the installation, as they are affected by it: each sculptural creature inhabiting the space is a loudspeaker in disguise – automatically determining the characteristics of the sounds being transmitted.

Combing her interests in queer ecology, feminism and electronic music production, Caterina Gobbi's performative works often involve participatory acts of walking and listening, producing drifting and transitory pieces in spaces. Through the use of creative writing, experimental sound, and different props, Caterina tells stories that lose the ordinary sense of time, weaving between present and past, vocalising both human and natural geographies. Her work seeks alternative frameworks to explore our relationship with the natural and fabricated world.