Opera Aria

Description:

Opera Aria is a single-channel video produced by Fernando Arias while in residence at Western Front. The work centres on a collection of glass slides from hospital blood-testing labs, which Arias glued together into a grid measuring approximately four feet wide and fifty feet long.

The fifteen-minute video is structured in four sections: abstract, reality, spirit, and illusion. Each section reflects an excerpt from the eighteenth-century Encyclopédie: or, a Systematic Dictionary of the Sciences, Arts, and Crafts, edited by Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert.

Throughout the video, the notated glass slides are layered with images of the artist’s body. In some sequences, Arias appears nude except for a surgical mask, while in others his skin is covered in blood and bodily fluids. Later sections introduce square cuts of meat arranged on a white table and superimposed with the artist’s body, and in the final section, the meat is placed on a latex silhouette of the artist’s body and folded. In Opera Aria, medical materials and Enlightenment-era texts position the body as an object of anatomical study, classification, and dissection, while unsettling the neutrality of scientific inquiry. 

Video documentation is available upon request.