Catinca Malaimare
Best Boy Electric, 2022

As exhibited as part of rafinerymonastery, 20th Biennial of Art Pančevo, 2022

(fragment) Interview between Monika Husar and Catinca Malaimare

Monika Husar: How did you find the concept of your work for the Biennale?
Catinca Malaimare: I titled the work in the Biennial “Best Boy Electric” as a way of framing the encounter with the celestial machines and the complexities that arise with an infinite incarnation of technologies as our objects of attraction. Machines are very interested in watching and observing, but they are not discreet.
Our encounters are more like confrontations and these dynamics keep getting exercised in my work. While with machines, we tend to realise how much the human sympathy for technology follows the formula of “like knows like”. We are capable of understanding them only through subjecting them to anthropomorphism or, in turn, we tend to technologise ourselves. There’s a lot of grey area I like to fill. This sense of kinship and sympathy, the sex appeal of the inorganic, is going to be present and playful.

MH: What’s the relation you had in mind between stone lions and digital surveillance systems?
CM: The thoughts surrounding surveillance came through the more religious channels of safeguarding inanimate figurations of divinities, an inconoclasm without the icon, where the stone lions are a loyal protector and a predator. With the existing systems of classification for the highest and lowest orders of angels, I saw an opportunity to think about a contemporary surveillance system in which every look you get is most likely already perverted, or ill-intentioned. The understanding of the “eye” has suffered many changes, being looked at tenderly is an “out of stock” product. Another face of the stone lion is the guardian angel. The Angels function very similarly to surveillance posts, they’re communication systems, they reproduce what they observe in a way that feels like they’re part of a much larger line of information. This modern application of a “guarding angel” sits neatly along the more grotesque mythological figurations. Angels are satellites.

MH: How do you see the ongoing problem with privacy issues related to cameras all over the cities, but also with online algorithms that track our activities?
CM: Access to anonymity seems like a fever dream. I wish it was sold at every corner of every street as a souvenir. If we could take away a little anonymity from every city rather than shedding some more personal action patterns in aid of other grand schemes. There’s always a way of invading privacy and more so now when our faces have become ever more public. And if we speak of faces, technology has a generally happy face, it’s very friendly even when it has the camera focused on you.