Nacoca Ko is an artist and curator based in Geneva, Switzerland. She takes us to a near future where virtual images intertwine with a fragmented reality, seeding new cultural narratives. Her work leads us to reflect on how recent technology impacts our psyche, as she explores the collective consciousness, moving between raw matter and virtual worlds, working with non-human and artifical intelligence. Questioning sustainability within current systems and challenging our ways of thinking and dreaming, Ko positions human beings as a pivotal link between nature and technology.
Nacoca Ko has exhibited at Espace L and Andata/Ritorno galleries in Geneva, at Dock-Basel in Basel, and Espace Arlaud, Lausanne, Switzerland; at UltraSuperNew Gallery in Tokyo, Japan; at the New Currents Festival in Santa Fe, NM, USA; with CADAF in Paris, France, Mock Jungle in Bologna, Italy, and was a resident with Offsite Project in London. Her work has also been shown at various international exhibitions in the metaverse.
Focusing on forms that transcend their original media, she works from the digital to the material and back again. By digging into concrete, styrofoam, and washed-up plastics, she reveals the sedimentary layer of waste humans leave as evidence of their existence on the planet, fossils for the imagination of history. The tangible effect of our material impact works as an entry point for transformation in the worlds she imagines, animating the anxiety of acceleration, distorting landscapes, and crossing boundaries between the codes of what is real.
Looping from futurism, she looks backward toward tribal anthropology. What did those wise sages know, looking out at the unmapped stars? What meaning and understanding did they have, that we may have lost, relinquishing our slow rites of passage and a sense of oneness? Sourcing from the universality of humankind throughout time, she brings with her some of the mystery, magic, and mutiny.
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Maybe there are some random mutations, but we all knew for a long while, that the oral histories we pass down are an intuitive mimicry of the way our DNA passes stories to the next generation. Reproduction is an Epigenetic Incantation. Heat-seeking missiles penetrate humans one by one. Viral memes infect them with parasitic mind control, nano infusions recode their DNA. We risk disappearing from the inside out.
Our global culture is woven from will and imagination - the ideas from our minds that create a chair, a social media community,
a food redistribution program, a spaceship, a mine for raw materials… our cognition spreads out to affect every aspect of existence on this planet.
We are pushed through progress, squeezed, immersed in new realms. Everything around us moves exponentially- we fall into vertigo, robbed of prediction, stability and a sense of concrete matter. And yet we keep climbing the wall, staying with the singularity. Our consciousness and will are sucked into a kind of liminal haze. But the liminal is just the place where energy and ideas are transmitted to materiality, a phygital space where dreams are transcribed into language.
Nacoca Ko