Discover the contemporary work of Aka Sh@Zz
“This is how my essence as a woman is expressed”
Despite a chronic illness that she developed in her thirties, (Aka)Sh@Zz nevertheless continues to explore the creative practices she has always loved: painting, collages, writing, photography, dance, storytelling, singing, sewing, mosaics, in addition to her work as a teacher.
Over time, she understands that this hypersensitivity that she has experienced since childhood characterizes not only her physical reactions, but also her neurological functioning. It is in this fundamental divergence that one of her greatest frustrations of being-in-the-world is undoubtedly lodged, but also some of her greatest assets, including synesthesia - among other atypicalities.
(Aka)Sh@Zz associates colors, shapes, music, images or titles with situations, tastes with words, communicates through images, wordplay, sounds, and often finds herself bringing together worlds that do not usually associate with each other.
And it is in the depths of the global crisis of 2020 that she settles into the life of an artist by giving birth to her most compelling artistic project, developed and obvious, hence its name:
Hey! Life! Dance!
Sh@Zz dances her paintings, committing all the vitality she has to a moment of respite, relying on the rhythm, the message of the words, the sounds that accompany her, the moods and intuitions that guide her, translating emotions into movements.
And from this communion between dance, music and colored matter emerges a singular energy that impregnates the canvas with its trace and its unique vibration in an instant T.
Here appears the first draft on the support, the beginning of a narration materialized on a canvas.
This first draft of a story on the canvas, (Aka)Sh@Zz continues it, refines it and finalizes it in the workshop following her self-taught inspiration. Everything she has integrated over time, everything that has awakened his curiosity or his aesthetic sense is consciously or unconsciously absorbed, digested, reinvested at one time or another...And one day, restored at the turn of a dance movement or a brushstroke, a mixture of colors or a choreographic or stylistic inspiration.
The short videos, visible on Instagram, briefly recount the initial development of the XXL canvases, they partly reveal the stories that cross his mind and his emotional field, other than with words.
Even if we find the golden color in many of his creations, or even “fusions” of fairly recurring colors, as well as the use of charcoal or dry chalk, she refuses to "confine herself to a style" recognizable among all, to have this "touch" which makes one immediately distinguish an artist from all the others, she is a chameleon and explores with happiness, in this also lies her identity: "air, air …/… que no te encajen …/… que no te encadenes "(Pablo Neruda - oda al aire)
The Hey! Life! Dance! project and the artist's other works are viscerally rooted in the struggle between Eros and Thanatos, evoke our painful experiences, our traumas and what we do with them, flirt with resilience (doomed from the start?) and hope to demonstrate once again to what extent the flowers that grow on a field of ruins are no less intensely alive, how our differences as beings-in-the-world, our singularities, are rich for all.
This is how (Aka)Sh@Zz challenges the public on the themes, often dual, that haunt her: The living, and therefore the Human (at the heart of a society launched into a crazy technological race) facing Nature, the constant fight for a life in dignity in a world undergoing great change, the search of each person for a certain peace and balance in their lives, the question of homeostasis (globally), questions about the role and place of the feminine in our Western societies and inevitably about the masculine polarity today, or even about the need for materiality and spirituality in our existence, in addition to the eternal questions of the heart and soul...
a song of love to life, despite everything...
