Nina Caspari graduated in 2011 as a Crossmedia Designer at the AKI in Enschede followed by a master of visual and audiovisual arts at Sint-Lukas Brussel, Belgium. This year she won the Andreï Ivaneanu Award of the Artesis Plantijn University College in Antwerp for most theatrical costume design for the production ARMORA.
The video installation Armora is a portrait of modern love, told through the main character Armora, inspired by the myth of Amor, and couples she gives love to. A portrait of modern love after the first flame has been extinct. The time when the ‘we’ is replaced by the ‘I’ and the partner has become more a restriction than an enrichment.
Armora explores the thin line between love, eroticism and death. Starting with the core-story of Armora, I tried to express and tell the whole story through costumes. I wanted the costumes to be the emotional carrier. Herefore I was researching and experimenting in how far costumes were able to express emotions of love, life and death. Inspired by `La petite mort`, the near-death experience felt during an orgasm and by the imagery of religion in which eroticism, death and violence often occur in combination, I tried to express the longing of my main character and the disastrous evolutions of the couples she gives love to.
Her neverending Sehnsucht for eternal love drives Armora into desperation. She would take any risk to experience the love she is longing for.
‘Before I die, I want to live.’
Nina is an admirable talent. She is able to visualize what she has in her mind using special and innovative methods. Top visual communication. In addition she is also technically very talented. Reality is somewhere. Fantasy will take her anywhere …
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Website: Nina Caspari
