120 giornate Damián Ortega, 2002

"The project consists of the alteration of one hundred and twenty Coca-Cola bottles, each transformed individually in the 'Vilca' crystal molding workshop in Colle di Val d'Elsa, Tuscany.

The choice of the bottle responds, apart from the familiarity and uniformity it has with its shape all over the world, to the fact that it implies a series of marketing postulates as a product that conveys trust due to its stability, hygiene, continuity, distribution, etc.

Another point of interest lies in the traditional association between the shape of the bottle and the female body.

The deformation process carried out manually on each bottle gives them a character of irregularity and subjectivity.

A fundamental aspect of the work was that the craftsmen were able to improvise and bring solutions to each bottle, thanks to their experience, skill, and knowledge of the material.

I am interested in the relationship that the bottle can imply between the human body and the industrial object, and the craftsmanship manipulation, whose technical process can recall torture or perversion. The brutal treatment of a familiar shape or the glorification of an everyday object is an exercise aimed at perverting and deconstructing the shape, function, material, value, and content of the bottle.

The quantity displayed refers to the novel The 120 Days of Sodom by Marquis de Sade and Pasolini's film *Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom. The total number of bottles is divided into 10 and 12 groups, in which the same part of the bottle is transformed: mouth, neck, torso, "belly" (voluptuousness), skin (piercings, tattoos, diseases), organs (contents), unions (sex, orgies), weapons (political vision), cosmogony (conception of the universe), religion (advertising).

"

— Damiàn Ortega, “Arte all’Arte VII”, 2002

For the VII edition of Arte all'Arte, the curator Vicente Todolì invited Damián Ortega to exhibit at the Enopolio in Poggibonsi “120 Days,” variations on the theme produced based on his project by local crystal artisans.

"(...) The artist transforms objects and situations with irreverence, but without reducing the meaning of his work to a single vision. Thus, a reality emerges, marked by an ironic and playful gaze, capable of creating a short circuit where even terribly serious issues seem, at the same time, profoundly ridiculous.

By emphasizing the uselessness, another sense emerges, another level detached from the narrow logic of production: the discard occurs by making seemingly marginal aspects the protagonists, as in the case of a very recent photographic series where the artist portrays plants capable of growing by carving out a vital space between the cracks of the asphalt.

For Arte all'Arte, Ortega chose to confront the globally recognized image of the Coca-Cola bottle, whose sinuous forms echo the silhouette of the female body. A true icon of the consumer world, this bottle has traversed the 20th century maintaining its popularity intact: celebrated or considered a symbol to be toppled depending on one's perspective, it has firmly entered the iconography of contemporary art, among the most notable examples being Andy Warhol's reproductions and Cildo Meireles' *Inserções em Circuitos Ideológicos*, where the artist, by manipulating the labels, inserted a critical element into the process of commodity circulation.

Ortega exhibited his work at the Enopolio in Poggibonsi, placing the bottles on a shelf made of wooden planks running along the walls and the machines for bottling wine still present in the space: 120 variations on the theme produced by the artist himself based on his free project, partly involving his collaborators – the glassmakers of the Vilca factory – allowing them the freedom to imagine further variations. The artist introduces us to a universe of bizarre forms, where the standard requirements of contemporary industrial production, the recognizable shape that over time has become a symbol of safety and reliability for the consumer, are put into crisis. The bottles become human bodies, and the focus is on the relationships between the massified body and the interventions of craftsmanship manipulation, which includes the most varied treatments, from scarification practices to torture.

Starting from the title, 120 Giornate, which evokes the literary world of De Sade, Le 120 Giornate di Sodoma, but also Pasolini’s cinematic adaptation, Ortega presents a world of the unexpected, where variations have been made on the bottles/bodies in relation to the original model, with distortions intended as transformations of one or another part of the body: the mouth, the neck, the skin, the organs, the union, the monsters, the body as a battlefield."

Vicente Todolì, “Arte all’Arte VII”, 2002

Credits

Damian Ortega
120 giornate, 2002
120 bottiglie in cristallo / 120 crystal bottles Poggibonsi, Arte all’Arte VII
foto Ela Bialkowska

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