CURA.

In Tita Cicognani’s video I Am So Full of Longing and Desire it Gushes Out of My Knees as They Scrape the Ground Upon Which I Crawl Toward You (2020), a CGI avatar of a woman in nothing but a black bikini crawls across beaches, deserts, the starry celestial sphere itself, in search of the person that had once given her a bouquet of flowers. Set to a slowed-down version of Alice DeeJay’s Better Off Alone, the piece cuts between scenes of amorous affection pulled from popular culture (The Princess Bride, Legally Blonde, and the infamous shot of Kanye West and Kim Kardashian on a motorcycle in the music video for Bound 2 all make an appearance) and close-ups of the avatar’s weeping face, bleeding knees, and the streaks of blood that she leaves behind. With its synthetic genericness, the avatar at once dilutes the specificity of identity and brings to the surface the visceral, shredded intensity of the piece’s affective core. After all, who among us hasn’t humiliated ourselves for the object of our affection, begging for crumbs?

In Cicognani’s video, desire is precarious—deleterious, even. At the same time that it promises us love, it puts us at risk of injury, disappointment, and heartbreak. To that end, to paraphrase Lauren Berlant, desire can also be cruel—it strings us along even when it is “an obstacle to [our] flourishing,” even when what we want the most (a rose, a kiss) is nowhere in sight.¹ But pain is not the only corollary to this cruelty. Between the tears and wounds, the avatar also dances by the beach, laughing and twirling, elated at the possibility of romance. If the question is “do you think you’re better off alone,” the avatar’s scraped knees tell us emphatically: yes, but we don’t want to be alone.

Central to Cicognani’s art is this polymorphous complexity of desire, in which pleasure exists alongside degradation—oftentimes not in spite of, but because of it. What Cicognani is interested in is the ecstasy of debasement, of wholly yielding ourselves to another for their enjoyment. One way through which she mediates this dynamic is by drawing out a connection between kink and religiosity—we fall to our knees not only to grovel, but also in worship. In an earlier work, Prayer Cards (2019), Cicognani pairs an image of a woman bound and gagged with the prayer of St. Francis of Assisi, blurring the line between sexual submissiveness and religious devotion. In a perverse but playful twist to the prayer, we might say that Cicognani’s artistic practice is an instrument of the contrariness of desire: where there is pain, she brings pleasure; where there is degradation, she brings bliss; where there is violence, she brings intimacy.

Cicognani’s work speaks to a simple, if uncomfortable, truth: what we shy away from is often what turns us on the most. Desire and repulsion are two sides of the same coin, and, through her art, Cicognani teases out the multiple valences of its erotic charge. In Heavy Play (2019), she gathers together a series of photographs that depict bruised and bloodied flesh and UV prints them on silk, juxtaposing the “heaviness” of the sexual encounter with the sensuousness and softness of the fabric, rendering material that mushy feeling that inundates us when we trust our bodies to the hands of another—no matter how much it might hurt. On the contrary, it is the promise of pain that excites. Pinned against the wall, these silk prints resemble a tapestry that hangs above one’s bed or a beach towel ready to keep a loved one warm, gently inviting us to reach out and touch, to imagine ourselves in this scene of play.

Much of Cicognani’s work has a tactile, reciprocal dimension, alive to a physical relationship with the audience with whom it shares space—such as silk drapery, such as prayer cards that could be held in the palm of our hands. In Infinite Caca (2022)—the artist’s first piece since completing her Master of Fine Arts at the ArtCenter College of Design—however, Cicognani takes one step further and grafts us into her sexual world as active participants. The centerpiece of the installation is an inflatable hot tub—replete with technicolor lights and textile patterns of butterflies and flowers—that, with each beat of the ambient soundtrack playing in the back, cajoles us into dipping our toes in its warm waters. Although desire remains the through line that connects Cicognani’s body of work, Infinite Caca is anchored to a more sustained emphasis on the fleshly. Not only does the artist herself make an appearance as one of the mud wrestlers in the video companion, the space of the installation actively anticipates and welcomes the viewer’s body becoming one with the art.

If, in her other pieces, Cicognani turns to the mutual imbrication of pleasure and shame, in Infinite Caca, she extends this inquiry into the site of the body, in its dual potential to arouse and disgust. For a site as romantic as the hot tub—a staple of every love hotel and the “fantasy suite” on The Bachelor—Infinite Caca is more interested in what Julia Kristeva terms the “abject,” the moments when “desire turns inside” and provokes feelings of repulsion.² Accompanying the installation is a video, in which two women wrestle each other in a mud-filled swimming pool. Further, the hot tub itself is adorned with miniature fountains sprouting dark brown fluids, evoking both the sludge of mud in the video and of the “caca” in the title. The body, then, is not only a vessel for erotic pleasure, but also one for defecation, waste, and excess.

Yet, contrary to Kristeva’s notion of abjection that always necessitates a radical rejection, Cicognani handles what we are averse to with care, warmth, and humor. Throughout the video are computer-generated gifs of butterflies and doves that fly across the screen, affording the piece a glittery, whimsy flair. Couched within this girlish addition to the piece, however, is an insistence that our body—with its capacity for pleasure as well as filth—belongs in the same ecology of intimacy as butterflies, doves, warm waters. And, in this sense, Cicognani’s work embodies Brian Massumi’s definition of the joyous: it tells us that “we have to live our immersion in the world, really experience our belonging to this world, which is the same thing as our belonging to each other, and live that so intensely together that there is no room to doubt the reality of it.”³ For Cicognani, more is more: more desire, more humiliation, more messiness, more joy, more lived intensities that animate shit into love.