ARSENIC BALLERINAS

Ioana Vreme Moser is a Romanian sound artist engaged with hardware electronics, speculative research, and tactile experimentation.

Her practice uses deliberately rough electronic processes to extract different materialities of sound, placing components and control voltages in direct interaction with her body, organic matter, found objects, and environmental stimuli. From these volatile encounters, sound emerges as a carrier of personal narration and critical observation, tracing the histories of electronic technologies, their production chains, wastelands, and entanglements with the natural world.

A lipstick shares the shape and materiality of a bullet, sometimes coloured with radium or with lead, and most times hiding in a brass shell. During the Second World War, lipstick tubes were melted into bullets, and bullets became lipstick tubes. Lead, arsenic, and mercury became shared and favoured materials. Found in early radio experiments and now in our computing devices, these heavy metals slowly spread from our lips to our technologies. Can the inherited toxicity of one’s lipstick become a semiconductor that receives radio transmissions? And if so, which transmissions would it receive? Arsenic Ballerinas is a long-term research project that turns to the mineralogy of cosmetics to transmit an uncharted part of radio and war history.

The installation presents a swarm of resonating radio lipsticks that hold the charged instant before a bullet breaks the air. Tilted and arranged in formation, these 'Ballerinas' become projectiles that expose through tension the intertwined histories of wartime transformations, YL networks (YL or young lady operators is code for amateur women radio operators regardless of age), and the heavy-metal mineralogy embedded in cosmetics and radio circuitry alike. The lipsticks become FM radio receivers, concealment agents with their anatomy functioning as electronic components. The metal shells, assorted with tiny loudspeakers, resonate and shield the circuit, and the lipsticks themselves embed antennas. Piercing through radio static, a multitude of transmissions bombard the space with YL tales in Morse code and voice, archival Lipstick propaganda snippets and songs, as well as the artist's recording of her own Lipstick application. The clutter envelopes the public in an intimate time capsule, with sounds reflecting a pre-war moment braced for an unavoidable impact.