Natusha Croes: ludic touch

Family heritage has marked the creative development of Natusha Croes, a multidisciplinary artist coming from a family of musicians. In her artistic practice, she combines poetry, performance, drawing, installation, and readymade, to which she adds the musical tradition that runs through her veins, mainly transmitted through her father. The video art in which Natusha appears to be trying to revive the heart of a pig (extremely similar to that of a human being) was inspired by her father’s death.  The material records her manifest intention to resurrect that rhythmically beating heart, through which she maintained a connection with her father.

The concept of playful touch stems from that first video, which reveals itself as a hallmark in the development of other projects by the artist.

Natusha finds in the landscape of Aruba, her native country, an exquisite raw material to exploit through her artistic experiences. As a paradisiacal tourist destination, Aruba functions for Natusha as the genesis of professional practice to explore the body-landscape relationship through the multimediality of art. Tactus was the title of her multimedia performance project with video mapping and sound and poetic resources. She put her body in dialogue with the arid landscape of Aruba, where cacti grow and, through the sound stimulation of the thorns, generating rhythmic landscapes that invite a musical involvement. This sort of poetic transmission also stimulated a state of bodily listening, silence, and individual reunion. It doesn’t only reaffirm Natusha’s performative action; but also a work that expands multi-directionally, projecting more than a happening, a sound piece, where the body acts as a playful resource par excellence. 

TACTUS derived in a performative state in a continuum, a chain action based on touch as a central and recurrent element of her subsequent interventions. She explores everything related to touch from the reflexive dimension and in the relational sense of body-landscape, sound-landscape, sound-body: a triangulation of elements that derive towards sensorial experimentation. 

Touch indicates to feel. To feel provokes a tendency to caress, to rapport and to reflect through the felt-sense. On this basis, she developed “CARICIA”. An artistic exploration where she experimented with the relationship between the body and the residual elements of the landscape of Daimari, Aruba. She made the stone, the leaf, the thorn, and other resources of that site converge through touch with the body. That generated the production of a variety of talismans conceived as readymades. They are symbolic and material compounds that comprise all those natural elements of the region in their composition. She compliments this proposal with sound interventions, allowing her to establish a sort of reconnection with mother nature and her country’s heritage. She resorts to her musical heritage, body, and landscape as instrumentation of the performative action. She thus generates a sense of identity through the intervention. Not only that, but she develops a sense of belonging through the power of caressing, of touch.

Natusha’s trajectory articulates a path where the body becomes the mediation of touch. This is the form of interaction with the landscape, the sonorous, the visual, the sensorial. At first, she started attempting to revive the heart of a pig. That was followed by generating soundscapes through the primary elements of the Aruban geography, simultaneously deriving in CARICIA; obtaining readymades conceived in the form of talismans. These artistic operations resulted in animated mini-loops showing the poetic narrative that highlights the island’s ecological richness.

Natusha changes the relational discourse of touch between landscape and body to approach another dimension. In this case, a performative practice where she explores touch from interpersonal relationships with unknown subjects. In the same way that she does not know a stone, a leaf, the sounds of that natural environment in which she unfolded with previous projects, Natusha explores touch from the artistic operation of serving two strangers in a restaurant. The dialogic proportion now derives from a body-body relationship, where social touch and communicational touch become the axis of connection in this praxis and, in turn, the umbilical cord that links this action with her previous projects.  

Curaduria Malandra, Sept 2021