Weekend Portfolio: Igor Pjörrt
Apartamento by Igor Pjörrt
Apartamento, which means both ‘apartment’ and ‘separation’ in Portuguese – centres on living spaces and the transformations that occur within them. Growing up between apartments in the same complex a familiar feeling would remain in the new homes, now empty and encouraging transformation. Such is the experience of inhabiting a body, fluctuating from one state into another and disposing of baggage to accommodate for new visions of the self. In Apartamento, this oscillation takes place in the potential constellations around a gender binary. The dichotomy of masculine and feminine is replaced by a dichotomy between gender and its very negation. This renunciation, however, is an interminable shift, a gathering of questions rather than answers, a set of daily contemplations in the face of psychic constructs.
In the stage that makes up Apartamento I recognise an invisible support structure in the figure of my single mother. She joins me in subtly playful acts inspired by her use of artifice to create illusions of luxury escaping her own social background. Together, we make up images that stand as subliminal signifiers, representations of a life relying on ambiguity and speculation. Departing from an early experience of family and fortune destabilisation, this series was developed as a meditation on the intermingling of gender, sexuality, class, domesticity, motherhood and insularity.
A result of confinement during the pandemic, Apartamento is treated as a set of intimate practices or ‘dispossessions’, an amalgamation of frustration and desire to transgress both body and space which is translated into hyper-aestheticised and aseptic compositions. This fabrication entertains a voyeuristic and performative play for the camera, turning the apartment into a gestation vessel slowly polishing a renewed vision of the self for the outside world.
To view more of Igor’s work, visit their website or instagram.
