Yeni & Nan, Integrations in Water, performance, 1982
Yeni & Nan
Integrations in Water

Jennifer Hackshaw (Venezuela, 1948) and María Luisa González (Venezuela, 1956) worked as a team from 1978 to 1986 under the name of Yeni & Nan. Polaroid photographs, installations, performances and photographs make up their artistic universe under the motto “the body as nature”. With a background in psychology and theatre, both artists were practitioners of martial arts and yoga, which guaranteed great physical consistency to their performances. Essential to their artistic proposals is a return to nature and a fusion with the cosmos. The processes of metamorphosis and the cycles of life make up their artistic imagination, which can be summarised as “one’s body as a body of the world”. EF, MM

The artists are dressed in black. They enter into a large transparent bag filled with water suspended from the ceiling, reminding us of an amniotic sac, in which it seems to be possible to return to the floating life that precedes birth. They help each other in perfect harmony and rid themselves of the black clothes to reveal a white elastic fabric that shrouds them like an osmotic membrane. Finally, the artists leave the bag, breaking water – symbolically reborn. Water
as a vital oceanic and organic element, from which life emerges, also hosts and expels women in a state of duality – they are capable of giving and receiving life, simultaneously mothers and newborns in a poetic action where time confounds itself.


Courtesy Galería Faría + Fábregas, Caracas

Document media
video, colour, sound, 6:56 min

Issue date
1982

To be seen in
re.act.feminism #3 – polyphonies. interferences. drifts; re.act.feminism #2 – a performing archive, 2022-2023, 2011-2014

Relations
selected by Ève Gabriel Chabanon for re.act.feminism #3

Tags
nature, extended body, dis/appearance