Alien Armpit brings together short texts and images that the artist Vanessa Safavi made between 2013 and 2022.
Safavi collects and thinks about her personal, vivid reality around her home or while traveling, and, occasionally, she writes. Sometimes the writing
is automatic, about the art of seeing things: bodies, organs, elephants. In the book, non-chronologically arranged images of folded sheets of rubber revolve around a short story, daydreams, and poems, as if to suggest, in intimate relation, an encounter rather than the event itself. Between stillness and voice, Safavi breathes, amused while suffering.
Of Iranian, French and Swiss descent, Vanessa Safavi was born in 1980 in Lausanne (Switzerland). Her first research was strongly influenced by her cultural identity, spanning three countries and two continents. For several years, she has been exploring issues related to population movements, tourism, and the notion of exoticism. Then Vanessa Safavi has returned to the fundamentals of sculpture by engaging in an in-depth exploration of materials, especially silicone.
She questions the soft-sculptural possibilities of representing the body and its relationship to disease, sexuality, and identity, in the process revealing the body's complex, schizophrenic fragility—and the poetry that emanates therefrom.
