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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. Her research is 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. 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.
