The Venus Trap

Solo presentation with SpazioA Gallery

fiac! 2021, Paris, Fr

The Venus Trap presents works by artist Nona Inescu (b. 1991 in Bucharest) that focus on the interrelation between humankind and nature – animate and inanimate – with a particular focus on the Plantae kingdom, within the larger frame of landscape design. Inescu’s interdisciplinary art practice encompasses photographs, videos, sculptural installations and objects. The artist combines found objects from nature, such as stones or corals, with artificial or processed materials that imitate natural qualities. She dissects objects, removing them from their contexts, to carefully arrange them in sensual, poetic compositions of formal similarities and material juxtapositions in the exhibition space. Stones and plants are enlivened; subject and object merge into each other and are no longer clearly distinguishable. The artist draws analogies between human, animal, vegetal and mineral features and proposes possible interactions between human and non-human bodies through physical contact or touch. In this way, Inescu examines the interrelations of shaping or giving shape: have humans shaped nature, or has nature shaped humans?

The Venus Trap creates a heterotopic enclosed space in which several works, with different materialities, are in dialogue with each other. Heterotopia can be a single real place that juxtaposes several spaces. A garden can be a heterotopia, if it is a real space meant to be a microcosm of different environments, with plants from around the world. Michel Foucault uses the garden as an “other site” to illustrate the heterotopia as a spatial typology. The heterotopia forms one side of a reflective relationship he describes between utopias and heterotopias (as actual sites which are “other” enough to become an alternative, actual realities). This formula of the ideal world (utopia) with the actual world (heterotopia) is what Foucault calls “a sort of simultaneously mythic and real contestation of the space in which we live.”