Octavia o la ciudad suspendida, 2007
Site-specific installation for Capilla de los Dolores, Grado. 4 digital prints on aluminium, neon
Photo: Piru de la Puente
“This is the foundation of the city: a net which serves aspassage and as support” is how Italo Calvino defines Octavia,one of his Invisible Cities. Natalia Pastor takes this literary formulation as thestarting point for her conceptualisation of an installationwith silhouettes of female bodies standing out as the mostdistinctive elements, transmitting states of tension, struggle,despondency or neglect, which are then superimposed onindustrial landscapes or infrastructures in the Nalon area.
The symbolic component of these backdrops of smokychimneys and complex structures, remitting to a spaceprofoundly affected by the industrial crisis and restructuring,reinforces the idea of floating bodies, exhausted from thedaily struggle, weakened by intimate wounds and subjectto the winds of external events that turn them into mereobjects on which violent obsessions accumulate.
They are allbodies of women remitting to a female condition underminedby a double vexation: one socioeconomic, intensifying theconsequences of the crisis, taking them to their ultimateconsequences; and the vexation inherent to the femalecondition within a sociological system perpetuating ties andmarginalisation within the spider web closing the city limitsand turning them into a prison.
