Enrico Floriddia & Diana Duta – historia-hysteria.ro

Enrico Floriddia

Enrico Floriddia’s practice sits in displacement; it leans towards relational works, offers situations of common knowledge building, tenders invitations to contexts of idleness, uplifts kinships. Reciprocity, equity and agency are his constant preoccupations.

slanted.cc

Diana Duta

Diana Duta is a Brussels based artist. She works with visual, aural and nearly verbal language through performance, sound composition or writing. Duta’s work relies gently on translation and the re-interpretation of existing materials as techniques for generating new meaning. Her most recent project Jambes is a recording studio commissioning new work by artists experimenting with sound and voice.

dianaduta.com

Contribution to Historia-Hysteria
Testimony

I was a drum’s voice in the night but sleeping

sound piece / audio guide in Romanian and English, 16’23” and 15’40”

General area of interest: Egyptian collection
Specific area of interest: Ptolemaic period mummies: human mummy; mummy fragment (right lung); mummy fragment (right hand); phallus; phallus; baby crocodile; mummified bird of prey; mummified ibis; mummified bird (probably ibis)
Museum curator: Eugenia Beu-Dachin
Sources: Ella Fitzgerald, ‘Bewitched, bothered and bewildered’; Metternich Stela inscription; Philippa Lang, Medicine and Society in Ptolemaic Egypt; Edgar Allan Poe, ‘Some words with a mummy’ in Tales of Mystery and Imagination; Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The new Mestiza; Pat Remler, Egyptian Mythology A to Z; ‘Praises of the Bantu Kings’, collected by Jerome Rothernberg in Alcheringa, A Journal of Ethnopoetics, Issue One, 1970; Anne Carson, The Autobiography of Red; Heather Christle, The Trees The Trees.

Puzzled by the mere presence of mummies coming from Egypt at the National Museum of Transylvanian History, Enrico Floriddia and Diana Duta collaborated to fabricate a story for these living beings. Sinta Wibowo lent her voice to this patched out narrative: fickle but gentle.

[RO]

[EN]

What do we need art for?

♫

Everyone is trying to get to the bar
The name of the bar, the bar is called heaven
The band in heaven, they play my favourite song
Play it one more time, play it all night long
Heaven, heaven is a place, a place where nothing, nothing ever happens

Heaven, heaven is a place, a place where nothing, nothing ever happens
There is a party, everyone is there
Everyone will leave at exactly the same time
When this party’s over, it will start again
It will not be any different, it will be exactly the same
Heaven, heaven is a place, a place where nothing, nothing ever happens
When this kiss is over it will start again
It will not be any different, it will be exactly the same
It’s hard to imagine that nothing at all could be so exciting, could be this much fun
Heaven, heaven is a place, a place where nothing, nothing ever happens
Heaven, heaven is a place, a place where nothing, nothing ever happens.
♫

About my experience/contribution within the frame of Historia-Hysteria project

Our experience with the museum has been a constant discovery: while we were doing research on the mummy, we found out that a museum team was carrying out another kind of investigation on the same subject. A parallel convergence, a mute collaboration, a long distance relationship.

Where we are (situated) right now (it could be artistically, geographically or both)

We feel like we are situated at a crossroad.