Golden Nectar
Golden Nectar
Daniela Jakrlova Riva
Multimedia installation with VR – 2024
About the artwork
Golden Nectar is a multimedia installation with VR that inquires European colonial architecture and symbologies for creating a future-oriented understanding of history.
An amorphous mass fractures and multiplies, absorbing all the nectar from the flowers which exhausted turn sharp, cutting like blades. The sky thunders loudly, the water is rising. The sixth mass extinction of species is underway.
In the VR experience the viewer emerges on Earth after a thousand years into the future, forced to adopt an alien perspective, to visualize a time that does not belong to us which requires the disappearance of human beings in order to come to view.
An iconographic archive explores the parallels between violent western forms of the slave forts and castle plans built on Africa’s Gold Coast (present-day Ghana), and floral motifs from the end of the XV to the XIX century, suggesting that today’s environmental crisis cannot be discerned from colonial inhabitation – a brutal mode of subjugating lands, humans, and non-humans.
The creative process
Her research began as an investigation into perceived reality and the artistic gesture that manages to cross its boundaries, pushing thought towards ‘other’ territories.
She examines imagination agency using various media such as writing, moving images, photography and 3D modeling, where reality and fiction follow one another.
Moved by an interest in ecology and science fiction, through historical and cultural heritage she stitches together past and now, to reshape them in environments echoing with stories from the future.
About the artist
Born in Turin in 1997, Daniela Jakrlova’ Riva lives and works between Turin and Milan (Italy). She graduated from the Brera Academy of Fine Arts and continued her studies with the two-year course in Visual Arts and Curatorial Studies in NABA. Recent exhibitions are: “Invisible Festival” (2024), collective exhibition curated by XR4Heritage, Gare Maritime, Bruxelles, “Montagne Sacre” (2023), collective exhibition curated by Roberto Borghi, Galleria ARTRA, Milan, “Caves of the moon” (2022), solo exhibition curated by Giulia Profeti, Xcontemporary, Milan, “What fields or waves or mountains, what shapes of sky or plain?” (2021), collective exhibition curated by Francesca Cerutti, Irene Coscarella, mitikafe, Spazio Infernotto, Turin and “Blackout – Book” (2021), book-exhibition curated by Marco Scotini and Andris Brinkmanis, NABA, Milan. Learn more
