Arteles Catalogue 2023-2020

Silence Awareness Existence program / MARCH 2020
Christina Cucurullo
USA
www.spookstina.com
About
Christina Cucurullo is an experimental and experiential artist
whose work is an exploration of impermanence. Creating
textural loops from an array of pedals, toys, bass, vocals,
synth and found sounds, her performances are intense
and haunting. Since 2016, Cucurullo has played festivals
and venues across the US and Mexico under the moniker,
Spookstina. Her tour history includes performances inside
of a giant Wayne White puppet exhibit (Chattanooga, TN),
the Museo del Metro during rush hour (Mexico City, MX), an
hour-long set at a 48-hour non-stop drone festival inside of
an old shopping mall (Miami, FL), and many more.
For nearly 20 years, Cucurullo has been heavily involved in
all aspects of North Carolina’s DIY music community. She
is co-founder and co-director of All Data Lost (Raleigh, NC);
an annual DIY music festival in its third year, dedicated to
highlighting and connecting experimental musicians and
performance artists across NC and the US. She is passionate
about providing artists with new and positive opportunities
for personal and artistic growth.
When she’s not immersed in music, Cucurullo works full-time
for the Exhibits & Digital Media section in the basement of
one of the largest natural science museums in the southeast
USA (1mil+ visitors per year).
During her residency at Arteles, Cucurullo will be both
working on material for an upcoming album and enhancing
the conceptualization of her live performances.
Dreams & Nightmares
I began my time at Arteles working on some field recordings
and textural-based sound recordings inspired by the wintry
world around me, encapsulated in ice and snow. Wanting
to get closer to the human and environmental conditions of
darkness and fear, I began taking walks through the forest
in the middle of the night, armed with a meat hammer and
heavy metal flashlight. During these walks, I followed leftbehind
footprints in the snow through the tunnel of the
flashlight’s beam, and experienced a heightened sense of
sound through the darkness. Over the following weeks,
the severity of the COVID-19 pandemic set in and created
a roller coaster of emotional chaos. Many of us needed to
leave Arteles immediately, or become stranded indefinitely.
While being in the midst of this panic and anxiety, I began to
explore surreal themes of dreams and nightmares and how
they are separated from waking life by a thin veil between
consciousness and the subconscious. Likewise, how mirrors
create portals between life and death, and how it is through
them that we see a true reflection of how we’ve moved
through time. I wanted to see where and how light came into
play during dark moments in our life and how they could give
way to a new experience. My work continues, as traveling
home brought me into a world different from that which I had
left; a changed reality.