Eduardo Navarro: Octopia

Eduardo Navarro (Buenos Aires, 1979) attributes art the capacity to produce new possibilities of perception of the world around us. In his work, he confronts a diversity of organisms, studying them in an empiric form, in other words, through a sensible experience. While developing these approaches, Navarro recurs to various specialists (scientists, archeologists, athletes, spiritualists) with the idea of altering pre-established forms of conduct and behavior.

Navarro approaches each project as a new case study that enables him to investigate ways of thinking and expressions that are foreign to human perception. He has a profound interest in discovering how other organisms and elements think, feel, and perceive. The great challenge in this artistic practice, is to become that which is being investigated. In this way, Navarro proposes changes of situation, apparently absurd, which result in transformations that enable new understandings of the preset.

OCTOPIA, a project created for the Museo Tamayo, is the result of an investigation of the octopus, an animal whose intelligence derives from a complex nervous system that extends through its tentacles. For this project, Navarro has gathered 80 participants, including choreographers, dancers, and amateurs with the intention of generating a structure that is similar to an octopus, with a head that is operated by eight people and nine more participants extend throughout each tentacle. By gathering these groups of people the aim is to achieve a collective transformation in order to temporarily take the state of this animal, through an exploration of movement and corporal sensitivity.

Furthermore, OCTOPIA is a system of thought for an octopus which in a sculpture manner, occupies the museum; it is active inside and outside the building, through scheduled presentations. The activations, besides being a study on expression which omits speech as the primary mode of interaction, provides participants an integral communication experience that, by means of the cancellation of individuality and a particular research on sociomotricity, arrives at a new configuration for interacting with the world.