© Emmeline de Mooij & Melanie Bonajo, Untitled, from the series Bush Compulsion, a Primitive Breakthrough in the Modern Mind, 2008-2009
© Emmeline de Mooij & Melanie Bonajo, Untitled, from the series Bush Compulsion, a Primitive Breakthrough in the Modern Mind, 2008-2009
“Melanie Bonajo and Emmeline de Mooij (1978), who are based in Amsterdam, graduated from the Gerrit Rietveld Academy with diplomas in 2002. Emmeline started creating installations, while Melanie began experimenting with photography. However, both share an approach that is close to performance, often using their bodies in their mises en scène. It would thus be inappropriate to try to associate their work with a particular medium. Accustomed to artistic collaboration, they have joined forces for the project ‘Bush Compulsion: A Primitive Breakthrough in the Modern Mind’, which is being presented at the festival. The artists ask whether the comforts of modern life have caused us to lose our links with nature and its manifestations, disease and death. Has this interconnection been lost for good? Melanie Bonajo and Emmeline de Mooij shed their clothes and every other artefact of daily life, and, naked, they spend their days in the wood. Masks, fetish objects and adornments recall the society that they left behind at the edge of the forest: these new savages are adorned with bubble wrap and motorcycle helmets. The artists experiment; their sincere approach combines artistic genres seamlessly, as they decorously tread the fresh earth. “
source: Hyères 2009
More of Emmeline’s work here
More of Melanie’s work here (and one previous post about her here)
N I H I L S E N T I M E N T A L G I A, 