Mika Rottenberg

Mika Rottenberg, squeeze, 2010

Artist Mika Rottenberg is good at creating short films with bright and strong pictures, weird narratives and settings, and extending them to the real time and space.

In 2010's squeeze, she uses a short film to tell the story of a fat woman who is slowly crushed by a giant machine and finally squeezed out a cup of golden fruit juice, while the dust on the woman's skin is used as some kind of pigment to fall into a metal cap and mixed with vegetables. Meanwhile, women working in vegetable fields took off their gloves and poked their hands into the hole. The mixture was picked up by women sitting in closed rooms and began to wash and massage. On the other hand, women in the rainforest pour their bananas into giant machines. The whole production line across different regions is driven by a mysterious force to continuously squeeze, crush, and mix all kinds of raw materials, and then make inexplicable compounds.

In miks' works, she clearly points the problem to the uncontrolled global production and consumption. In her works, I can feel her doubts about the existing social rules. In a series of complex and logical rules established by the society, people have already fallen into these rules and no longer doubt whether they are reasonable. The short film uses this kind of "useless labor" without any thinking to reveal the nothingness behind.

Rottenberg calls her work film sculpture, because the interior scenes and props in her works have a strong sense of handmade. When you watch her works, you can observe some complex feeling like observing miniature situational toys from some enlarged close-ups. The artist also recruited women with various physical characteristics to play different production line employees through the Internet. She will magnify the body posture and working state of the production workers in the process of work in the form of a magnifying lens. This kind of lens is very attractive to me. It can make people feel uncomfortable and excite people. From her works, I can feel her dissatisfaction with the exploitation and exploitation of labor force in contemporary society. What's more interesting is that after I had a deep understanding of her works, I found out that queen raqui, a producer in the short film "squeeze", has a huge body in real life, and gets a living by providing trampling services to customers who like to be oppressed by heavy objects. Actors make a living by commercializing their bodies, which coincides with the meaning of the work. Through her unique camera language and strange plot setting, I can truly feel that under the domination of consumerism, everything can be sold, including people, and also feel people's numb mental state in this situation. In the third unit, I will make a freeze frame animation to reflect people's mental state under consumerism. The plot design and some camera language in her works have brought a lot of inspiration to my freeze frame animation.