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Digital Folklore at the Base of Volcanoes

Visual artists Kristin Reger and Gella Zefira collaborate on the transformative video art piece, 'Orb/Orbe1.'
Images courtesy the artists

An amorphous figure strolls through majestic mountainsides; the figure changes color and form before our eyes through a series of montages and alludes to an otherworldliness. It’s futuristic and pastoral in its attempt to reckon with centuries of ritual and legend. This is visual artists Kristin Reger and Gella Zefira's transformative and incorporeal video, Orb/Orbe1. 

“The orb is meant to create a sense of unease; the foreign, the unknown. It's also a metaphor for the merging of the digital world and earthly forms like the sun and the moon in these majestic locations that have a lot of folklore around them,” Zefira tells The Creators Project.

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The art video was shot over six months' time in Mexico at sacred sites at the basea of volcanoes Nevado de Toluca, Iztaccíhuatl, and Popocatépetl. Zefira captured and composed the sequences into the video artwork, while Reger scaled the barren landscapes and painstakingly constructed each of the large-scale costumes from Reger's own technique of cutting, surging, and layering hundreds of pieces of fabric.

Says Reger, “It's definitely not a dance performance. I'm not a dancer. I'm a visual artist; my approach is entirely plastic. I always design the costumes and they dictate everything. In many ways, these sculptural costumes are the performance.”

The two filmed for days at time despite altitude sickness and having no food. Perhaps these personal experiences furthered the notions of the physical turning metaphysical in the video itself.

Orb/Orbe 1 is currently on display at Casa Maauad, an artist-run residency program in Mexico City through the end of the week.

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