Tropic 02, 2023

Kika Nicolela’s GIFs are created from her seminal video artwork Tropic of Capricorn (2005).

This key work in her art practice is her starting point for reflections on participatory artwork and representations of the body. In the film, four trans women are asked to lay on a bed and reveal themselves to a camera mounted on the ceiling. During filming they share their fantasies, hopes, concerns and experiences of sex work in Sao Paolo. For Verse, Nicolela has reinterpreted this video work, extracting short excerpts of these bodies in movement, transforming them through different digital manipulations and trapping them in the eternal silent loops of GIFs.