keys to my city
The project, keys to my is the first part of a series of performative armors built by Gosti. Each armor is accompanied with a different performance that is born when the armor is worn and the elements, the parts that consitute it and their history. In 2016 Gosti built this dress made of keys. The result is and image charged with strenght and shininess that remids us of the armor of a knight, or the scales of a dragon. The movement of the dress, which reminds us of a flapper dress, creates a loud and melodic sound. Last year, using the same building technique, Alice created a new dress, another armor attaching the names of the Italian-Americans that were interned with the Japanese in the USA during the Second World War.
From there the desire to build a series of this sculpture, wearable armours, was born. The next armors will be created using pennies, italian chillies, bells and rocks.
In 2021 we partnered with the Vilcek Foundation and created the first dance film based on this kinetic sculpture. Lorraine Lau, Alyza DelPan-Monley and Alice Gosti don a dress made of 1,500 keys. The physical and psychic weight of the object—designed and constructed by Alice—inspire and influence the performers’ imagination and movements.
In 2016 I constructed a dress made of keys. With a mound of donated and found keys, I attached one at a time to a heavy-duty butcher frock thick enough to handle the weight of several thousand keys. The finished product was the first of my “armor” series, a series aesthetically inspired by Ann Hamilton’s toothpick suit and Nick Cave’s soundsuits. This sculpture had the luster and weight of a knight’s chainmail or dragon’s scales, but it moved lightly, swaying like a flapper dress. Similar to armor that prevents damage from being inflicted on an object, this dress provided me a protective outer layer as I explored my Italian history and identity in the performance “Keys to my city.” In 2018, I created a second armor for my solo-piece “Where is home: birds of passage.” This time I attached to a frock the names of 1,881 Italian-Americans who, like Japanese-Americans, were interned in the U.S. during WWII. The process of building the sculpture and choreography involved a deep dive into Italian immigration history to the U.S., and my personal experience as an Italian-American immigrant. Together the armor and performance served as a metaphor for how we exoticize, fear and other immigrants. “Where is home” provided an opportunity to build empathy in audiences who were generationally removed from their family’s migration story, while providing a cathartic space where immigrant audiences could see themselves reflected. This ongoing project aims to foster an ecosystem of immigrant artist role models and a world that is embracing immigrants.
The armors from “Keys to my city” and “Where is home” were created in relation to performance-based projects I was working on. This grounded the armors in movement and performance art practices. In creating both armors, I discovered the unique ways each sounded and moved. The sculptures guided my movement, as if I was playing the armors with my movement as one plays an instrument. The percussive sound of the keys hitting one another, bouncing to the floor, also contributed to the multidimensional nature of the piece. Aesthetically I’m interested in the visual impact of these armors, how the repetition of an object like keys or nametags, amplifies the metaphor and meaning of the larger piece.
I’m expanding this armor project and building a whole series of sculptures, called my armors. Each defensive covering will relate to different facets of my identity.