In MOTORA, Marta Navaridas goes through the highs and lows of the relationship between man and machine with a Volvo V60 as her dance partner. Aware of her own fragility, the performer explores her affects towards the mid-size station wagon and performs a poetic ritual of fatalism that meanders between erotic seduction, wishful thinking, AI dreams and tender anthropomorphisation.
In a way, not just our cars but all machines we build are mirrors of our desires and the way we think about ourselves and our relationship with the world. While we appear to make progress, the cars we build become safer, more autonomous and more connected. But most importantly, like us humans, they exponentially grow in number. Motor vehicles are the ultimate stereotypes of a capitalist promise – the promise of a dream come true, with a potential nightmare in its wake.
Inspired, among other sources, by Julia Ducournau’s Film Titane, MOTORA draws on stereotypical dreams of death and desire and motifs such as car wash, car party, and car sex, mixing them with intimate reflections of a person who subjects their relationship with their car to a crash test.
