Cristina Dezi
Cristina Dezi emerges as a queer artist and interdisciplinary designer, traversing diverse realms of creative expression. Employing a feminist lens, she delves into biomateriality and wearable technology, seamlessly blending textile exploration, new media art, sound design, biohacking, and performative activism. With a background in Fashion Design and New Textile Technologies, complemented by a master's degree in Experimental Animation, Cristina's expertise spans various disciplines. Her research and design endeavors extend into the realms of performance and costume, sex-technology, ecofeminism, technofeminism, as well as the exploration of witchcraft rituals and erotic cinema. As a co-founder alongside Giulia Tomasello, Cristina spearheads "Bruixes_Lab," a nomadic laboratory that intricately weaves together intimate biotechnology, transfeminist ideologies, and DIY practices within the rich tapestry of natural environments, microbiology, and bodily fluids.
What prompted your research on sexuality and technology? Can you share a bit about yourself and the journey that led you to this exploration?
Let's start with the fact that my artistic and personal research as well as my professional career have always been influenced and inspired by topics related to sexuality, eroticism, pleasure exploration and the occult. From working in strip clubs to directing erotic films, from collecting orgasmic voices and fragments of orgies to making vulva costumes and props, resisting prejudice and sexism, repression and censorship.
Experimenting with sexuality and pleasures plays and has always played an important role in my process of creativity, self-expression and self-empowerment as human and woman, and acts as an excellent resource for bodily exploration to uncover personal boundaries and joys.
I use technology as an additional lab tool within the sexual exploration experience, an extension of the body that helps to enhance the erotic experience and self awareness, while broadening a greater understanding of intimate care, the sexual self education that we never had.
It was only after attending a virtual Sextech Hackaton (2021) - an event that brings together industry professionals, developers, designers and enthusiasts to collaborate and create innovative solutions in the field of sexual technologies - to fully engage in experimenting with sexuality and technology in my profession and taboo myself from the stigmas and fears surrounding it. These events offer the opportunity to connect and be supported by a community of like-minded people, as well as professionals in the field, and emphasise a careful consideration of ethical implications and safety within it. I learnt how to disassemble dildos, reassemble and customise them, and gain a deeper understanding of the electronics by hacking their circuits, I adopted a 'Thinking through making' and Do-It-Yourself approach, disciplines that allow us to develop a critical mindset to encourage oneself to take control in shaping our lives, our bodies and our environments, and helps to foster a sense of self-sufficiency and personal growth.
This experience has led me to think more expansively and consciously about what changes or improvements I would like to make in sextechnology to enhance a more intimate relationship with sexuality, to break boundaries of binarism, disentangle taboos and non-conventional anatomical structures.
Coming from a background in fashion and performance design combining with further studies on biomateriality and textile innovation, e-textile and wearable technology (Fabricademy Bcn -Iaac) the transition in integrating sextechnologies into the body, speculating on pleasure, double skins and haptic orgies design it has been very organic and orgasmic!
““Before the recent advancements in teledildonics and sex toys/sex robots that focus more on personal experience, there were essentially two options – a sex toy shaped like a phallus, or one shaped, to put it bluntly, like a hole.” ”
Your works often involve fluids. Could you elaborate on the processes behind these works and the narratives you aim to convey through them? What role do fluids play in your artistic expression, and what do they symbolize for you?
We are mostly made of wet matter, but that is what disgusts or shames us the most. Sexual fluids, vaginal fluid, menstrual blood, semen are still taboo subjects, hidden discourses and secrets. The menstrual cycle has always been regarded as a time of fragility and weakness and still a great taboo in our society and unfortunately continues to hold a strong negative meaning, or worse a monster or something unmentionable. It acquires particular importance for me dictated by my personal and more intimate experiences, both negatives and positives. On my artworks, fluids and taboos become a visceral medium to visibilize conditions and raise awareness of discussions that need to change, they acquire a new meaning away from the limitations of society and closer to a more human consciousness, transcending sexual boundaries and aspiring to inclusivity and gender equality rather than perpetuate or exacerbate existing inequalities. I use fluids to empower bodies to confront human perceptions, prejudices and discomforts, fostering a more open and honest conversation about desire, breaking the taboo surrounding it and releasing pleasure and vulnerability through self-exploration. I use fluids as magical tools to redefine erotic self-awareness and tell hidden stories of sexuality.
““Blood, bile, intracellular fluid; a small ocean swallowed, a wild wetland in our gut; rivulets forsaken making their way from our inside to out, from watery womb to watery womb: we are bodies of water” ”
One of your projects involves a bodysuit that you’ve described as an ongoing, unfinished endeavour, continued through workshops. It seems to resonate with a notion of changeable and liberated eroticism, where imagination knows no bounds, and new erogenous zones can potentially emerge. Could you explain the technical workings of these wearables and the poetics they embody?
As society's aesthetics, bodies and attitudes are changing with the evolution of advanced technologies, we are witnessing a new era of pleasure in which eroticism has greater exposure and its openness to exploration challenges traditional societal norms and redefines the boundaries and restrictive expectations around sexuality. When I first thought of designing the sx-bodysuit, I was envisioning a post-human eroticism that extends beyond conventional sources of pleasure and traditional notions of intimacy, somewhat romanticising a dystopian vision. Wearable sexual devices, more inclusive, queer, hybrid and fluid, capable of transcending traditional categories of gender and anatomical structures and satisfying the ever-evolving landscape of desire. The aim was and is to create personalised immersive intimate experiences able to adapt to individual preferences and foster greater awareness of erotic bliss and sexual self-exploration through sensory perceptions. The immersive nature and choreographed aesthetics of the interactive device led me to merge its design with the body itself to create pleasure prosthesis, bio-enhancements that generate a multi-sensory experience. Hence the conception of these second skins, biomaterials made from algae, aphrodisiac essential oils and sexual bodily fluids, to recreate a biological texture that we can wear. Symbiotic tissues from the surrounding natural environment and personalised by our own internal fluids, to not only deconstruct the taboos but give them a new connotation that totally subverts the norms of conventional intimacy and instigate a more open discourse over sexuality. The Biological textures incorporate soft-circuits, actuators and sensors according to the user's preference that produce frequencies, sounds, vibrations and chromatic changes and that respond to sexual stimuli, tactile information, and bodily warming, creating unique sensory experiences that could enhance or simulate other sensations, expanding the spectrum of pleasure beyond what is naturally attainable.
From a non-artistic standpoint, wearables are often viewed as instruments of power shaped by corporations, influencing and redefining the desires of individuals. They seemingly naturalize these desires, yet in reality, they are culturally induced products, much like sexuality and eroticism. By approaching them from an artistic perspective, how does a DIY wearable technology generate awareness and agency over one’s desire?
Do-it-yourself technology is in itself an anti-normative, anti-capitalist approach to building the future we need and preventing the mainstream from appropriating it. By allowing us to shape our lives and design our own products, it is a powerful tool for self-empowerment and personal growth and to encourage a critical and ethical sense of thinking. By understanding the functionality and process behind wearable technologies we can have a more active and creative approach to addressing social issues and solving intimate problems. The problem with technology is not the technology itself, but the people behind it; the acquisition of knowledge is also a re-appropriation of our minds, a decolonisation of our bodies, a re-education of attitudes and an eradication of limiting norms. This discourse also concerns sexuality, through self-exploration practices of an intimate and erotic nature that allow us to become more aware of our bodies and desires and to shape technology according to our values and needs. We are no longer spectators but creators of our own pleasures.
Art and life intertwine, and a profound and sincere artistic exploration often mirrors the subjectivity of the artist. How does Cristina Dezi’s reflection manifest in her works?
I myself am much more likely to express my intimate perspective through art than through words. I myself am much more likely to interpret it through my art than through my thoughts. My inner world is very transparent in my artwork, which is not only dictated by a desire to express, perform and embody it, but also to use it as a medium to inspire and provoke debate and critical reflection, to instigate a do-it-yourself and do-it-with-others approach, to tell stories and possible ethical solutions to overcome the taboos and stigmas of our bodies and society.
Drawing from your firsthand and third-person experiences, what impact do the works you produce have on eroticism and the sexual act? How do they reshape the performativity or spontaneity of desire, eroticism, and the sexual act? In what ways do they alter the temporality, gaze, expectations, movements, habits, fantasies, and enjoyment associated with these experiences?
By promoting a biohacking approach in the sexual sphere, speculating with interactive designs, blurring the barriers between body and technology and breaking up free the limitations of conventional norms of pleasure, the impact or change that could be generated in eroticism in my opinion is subjective, because it is the thinking and attitude around it that wants to be reshaped, a re-education and re-appropriation of one's desires and fantasies, a personalised vision liberalised from prejudices. Then the truth is that my personal utopian vision of eroticism has dystopian features, includes dark atmospheres, intergalactic orgies, smart fluids, liquid technologies, virtual brothels, alien sexual prosthetics, synthetic pleasures... then if you dare to explore mine you are welcome!
Courtesy of CRISTINA DEZI
interview by CHRISTIAN NIRVANA DAMATO
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