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I have weight: Rejane Cantoni and Leonardo Crescenti’s Tunnel

Faculty Advisor

Date

2018

Keywords

installations, human body and art, movement, embodiment

Abstract (summary)

In their installation Tunnel (2010), Brazilian artists Rejane Cantoni and Leonardo Crescenti invite people to walk through a six-meter long passageway that moves and requires people to adjust their balance to compensate for that motion. Spectators can interact individually or collectively; in both cases, the experience of the piece varies from one individual to another, because the weight and particular forms of body comportment of each subject imbue its motion with unique qualities. In every case, the embodied encounter with Tunnel produces metallic sounds that can be delicate, chaotic, or harsh, depending on people’s interactions. Questions of embodiment and movement lie at the heart of Cantoni and Crescenti’s work. Since 2007, the artists have produced a series of human-scale structures that adapt and distort themselves in response to people’s movement and weight. As an extension of this research, they developed Tunnel, which was driven by one central idea: to create a passageway that would move differently when different kinds of bodies walked on it—light and heavy, small and big. Cantoni and Crescenti took two years to accomplish the precision required by the piece to enable different qualities of movement. So why this rationale behind this piece? When I walked through Tunnel and saw other people interacting with it, it became clear to me that the simple logic of the apparatus—a movable passageway—drove attention towards my body by challenging my sense of balance.

Publication Information

Vergara-Vargas, Erandy. (2018) “I Have Weight: Rejane Cantoni and Leonardo Crescenti’s Tunnel.” In Horea Avram, E. (Ed.), Moving Images, Mobile Bodies: The Poetics and Practice of Corporeality in Visual and Performing Arts (pp. 208-244). Cambridge Scholars Publishing .

DOI

Notes

Item Type

Book Chapter

Language

Rights

All Rights Reserved