Nathalie Rey

The representation of the city turns towards a new production with “Porn City”, a complex work due to the diversity of layers and references it contains. While in the different versions of "State of siege" urban formations are threatened by a horde of plastic animals, in this case animals have replaced humans in a fantasy world. With this twist, Rey represents the inversion of the relationship of the human / animal domination that appears in numerous fables and narratives, such as Planet of the Apes (1963), and pushes us to reflect on the limits of human development models. The piece consists of a fragment of a 'soft' city made of pink felt that, like Pinocchio's toy island, has the appearance of a big candy. In this case, however, instead of children turned into donkeys, the city is populated by dozens of little pigs which adopt the model of mass-produced ceramic piggy banks - obviously related to money and passions or capital sins such as gluttony. It is complemented, in the autobiographical framework that underlies all of her work, by a strip of passport photographs with the artist wearing a pig headband. For Rey, this imaginary would be “the result of a 'collision' (improbable) of Orwell's novel Animal Farm (1945) and a rather bad documentary about Big Major’s uninhabited island, in the Bahamas, where about twenty pigs live, which have become a tourist attraction”. The artist translates Orwell's Stalinist pigs into the 21st century, and turns them into sympathetic capitalist pigs, which at the same time are the protagonists of “a satiated and sick society, victims of her own system”, she says. But as in Orwell's novel, the victims become executioners. Rey also observes these transmutations with Big Major’s pigs, where she notices a reversal of roles according to the capitalist strategy, which deliberately alters nature (in this case by introducing pigs) to obtain benefits (tourist exploitation, which consists of feeding animals after using and eating them).

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