ocean body (2021)

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filmmaker

installation DESIGNER

Ocean Body is an in-person music-media installation collaboratively created by composer and vocalist Shara Nova, renowned vocalist and performance artist Helga Davis, director- designer Mark DeChiazza, and visual artist Annica Cuppetelli. Ocean Body is a 4-screen, multi-channel sound installation that explores the potential of interracial coalition through the deep yet tenuous bonds of a friendship—the decade-long close friendship between Davis and Nova. Song, found text, conversations, and new compositions merge with DeChiazza’s original footage of the two women together and alone in the waters of the Gulf Coast, to create a multi-sensory experience of a place where sand, sun, and water, surround experiences of intense communion and also of profound isolation. Diptych cinematic imagery presenting imperfectly parallel viewpoints that might sometimes frame a subject similarly, but can never match, makes visceral the impossibility of an easily, shared truth. The imagery represents Davis and Nova interconnected within a sculptural dress built for two, by artist Annica Cuppetelli. Tethered, the two cannot avoid affecting each other, as the actions of one will move, confine, support, or even wholly re-shape the other. Ocean Body examines the sometimes conflicting needs for union and autonomy within a friendship, and the how we continually discover each other in new and transformational ways. The installation will be exhibited in the MainStage of New York City’s HEREarts, presented as a part of the PROTOTYPE Festival’s in person and digital 2021 festival from January 8 – 16, 2021.

Ocean Body is an offshoot of a larger performance-work Body Vessel for stage, which is being developed with support from Carolina Performing Arts and The Knight Foundation.