Andrea Crespo: a day in the lives of (2016) is co-presented by Rhizome and the New Museum as a part of First Look: New Art Online. The work is viewable at rhizome.org.
Andrea Crespo’s animated video a day in the lives of (2016) follows conjoined twins Cynthia and Celinde. The sisters have an agenda, but are still willing to take time to enjoy their favorite things—driving, taking walks—and to acclimate their guest with a constant stream of explanations, questions and opaque hints. Their tasks are mysterious, and they check up on your comprehension often. “You don’t know what we’re talking about, do you? …You seem a bit slow on the uptake,” they say, and later ask, “Got a clue yet?” They are rendered in the DeviantArt style Crespo favors: thin black scan-imported linework, soft-shading, smudge tool mimicking the texture of hair, tapered flat fingers and stock poses.
The twins have appeared in Crespo’s work before (recently, sis: parabiosis on DIS) but with different bodies. Ostensibly, they live in the mind of an autistic host, but Cynthia and Celinde seem to transmigrate elsewhere. They have a home on the internet, for example, maybe in an RPG forum or DeviantArt art trade, and pass materially through the circuits of a data center as often as the neurons of their host. They are no synecdoche for parts of the host, or for parts of you. They do not really have a parent. As they say, “we may be changelings, but we’re no stand-ins.”
Crespo’s art is world-making, in the sense that the work starts with a physical metaphor of psychology. The patterns of a subject’s brain chemistry are turned inside out like a topology problem, becoming the grass, the sky, the physics and space-time of a second universe. A brain becomes the field of play. In the video, the messy transferal of a white chemical into a test tube triggers an ecstatic loss of consciousness; the screen goes black until shaking, flickering text spells out a reset. Later, the twins stow away netting-wrapped cargo in a plane’s belly, “beneath awareness’s grasp,” and a glitch reveals the contents: a tranche of blurred forum screenshots. The twins are playing memory games, stacking dominoes that will fall, sometime later, in the mind of their host.
But the metaphor isn’t the end: the new inner world resists linking analogically to its progenitor and claims the power to play out its own rules. The host is part of Cynthia and Celinde’s day but cannot entirely determine what happens within it, nor can the twins ventriloquize the host. So the metaphor is made strange, like smelling the unfamiliarity of your home after a long time away. Crespo creates this dynamic best with sound. Layered ambient noises leak in from the background– helicopters, rain, the percussion of a handful of car keys, engines whining. They are sharper and isolated in their own particularity, a familiar urban hum made immanent. Sound becomes something different against the twins’ ears.
It would give too much credit to Freudian theory to say that Crespo’s work refutes it. But his argument for a two-sex split as the precondition for selfhood is nicely swept away in Crespo’s work. Instead, we get multi-voiced tangles of identification that, specifically through their unfamiliarity, have much more to do with how people build understandings of who they are. In Crespo’s hands, this always-incomplete project does justice to its component parts, human and nonhuman alike. The divided subject is a theme of Freudianism and postmodernism, and conjoined sisters Cynthia and Celinde fit the description in name only. It is almost a pun. But the way their bodies and minds commingle and emerge represents something new.
Cynthia and Celinde insist that they are not stand-ins. They also pester their guest to decode who they are and what is happening, and at first, the riddle seems to ask what facet of the host’s mind the twins represent. But this contradicts what they themselves are saying: don’t treat them synecdochically, as one piece that clicks into place in an analogy for the whole. The answer is that Cynthia and Celinde aren’t the host’s autism, memory, neurons or erotics. They don’t belong to the host; they act outside of that metaphor and, although their relationships are speculative, they’re certainly not proprietary, no more than you could claim to own bacteria that once lived in your stomach. a day in the lives of does not personify a specific type of neurodivergence as much it personifies component personhood: the contingencies that make us up have an agency of their own. When the host speaks, you don’t hear one voice.
