Nature Boy (2023) unfolds as a twin-film installation in which repetition is never redundancy but calibrated difference. Conceived as a natural, video, and sound-based installation, the work stages two parallel yet non-identical sequences: HIM and HER. Both videos present vegetal motifs—leaves, stems, organic growth—set against a neutral, textured surface, while the same song, Nature Boy, is performed once by a male voice and once by a female voice. The apparent symmetry is immediately unsettled by temporal and tonal deviations: gestures recur but do not coincide, images resemble each other but never align perfectly. This slight disjunction is the conceptual motor of the piece. Rather than pursuing harmony through sameness, the work proposes equilibrium through difference. Installed as a pair, the videos function as a dialogic system, where perception oscillates between comparison and immersion. The viewer is invited to inhabit a space of attentiveness, listening for nuance rather than resolution. In this sense, Nature Boy operates within a tradition of durational and minimal practices, yet it resists formal austerity by grounding its structure in organic matter and vocal intimacy.
The vegetal imagery is neither decorative nor symbolic in a conventional sense. Leaves fall, tremble, and occupy the frame with a quiet insistence that foregrounds growth as process rather than metaphor. Nature here is not represented as landscape but as proximity: a fragment, a surface, a living detail. This aligns the work with ecological aesthetics that privilege scale, fragility, and contingency. The installation does not monumentalise nature; it listens to it. The textured wall behind the plants—marked by cracks, stains, and mineral residue—introduces a temporal depth that contrasts with the vitality of the leaves. This juxtaposition situates the work between the living and the residual, the ephemeral and the sedimented. Summer 2023 becomes not a backdrop but a condition: light, heat, and seasonal rhythm permeate the work without being illustrated. As in earlier practices associated with LaPieza, the installation privileges the everyday and the local, resisting spectacularisation. The natural is not an abstract category but a lived environment, encountered through attention and repetition. By refusing identical sequences, the work insists on variability as an ecological and aesthetic principle.
Sound is central to the work’s conceptual architecture. The choice of Nature Boy—a song historically associated with romanticised notions of nature and wisdom—is recontextualised through gendered vocal difference. The male and female voices do not compete; they balance each other, producing a relational field rather than a hierarchy. Each voice carries its own grain, breath, and emotional register, subtly altering the song’s affective economy. The listener becomes aware that meaning is not contained in the composition alone but emerges through its embodiment. This dual vocalisation resonates with feminist and post-human critiques of singular authorship and unified subjectivity. HIM and HER are not characters but positions within a system, relational rather than fixed. The sound installation thus performs what it proposes: balance achieved through coexistence rather than fusion. Importantly, the videos are similar enough to invite comparison yet distinct enough to resist synchronisation. This tension generates a productive instability, encouraging the viewer to move between screens, between voices, between interpretations. The work listens as much as it speaks, positioning sound as a spatial and ethical medium.
In conclusion, Nature Boy articulates a refined exploration of balance, difference, and ecological attention within contemporary installation practice. Its strength lies in restraint: minimal visual elements, a single song, two voices, and a repeated yet unstable structure. Through these means, the work proposes an ethics of coexistence grounded in listening and observation. The twin format rejects the logic of the original and the copy, replacing it with a model of parallel becoming. Nature is not idealised nor instrumentalised; it is allowed to appear as process, fluctuation, and presence. Situated within LaPieza Art Series, the work continues a trajectory concerned with durational practices, material modesty, and the politics of attention. Nature Boy does not resolve the tension between the natural and the cultural; instead, it holds them in suspension, allowing meaning to emerge through time. As a video and sound installation, it affirms that contemporary art can still operate as a site of calibration—between voices, bodies, and environments—where balance is not given but continuously negotiated.
Lloveras, A. (2023a) Nature Boy (HIM). LaPieza Art Series [Video]. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMdr7cjvams
Lloveras, A. (2023b) Nature Boy (HER). LaPieza Art Series [Video]. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMdr7cjvams
