For her newest work cycle Cripto Sirenas Anna Ehrenstein teamed up with austrian artist Sunny Pfalzer and the San Salvador based artists Lucy Tomasino and Alexa Evangelista, as well as the web3 researcher Josh Davila. Cripto Sirenas is collaborative sci-fi fable and multi-media worldbuilding venture centered around a collaborative 360° video work and extending through installation, sculptures and mixed-media photographic works. The cycle speculates on tech-solutionism, totalitarian algorithms, and their impact on our bodies through an eco- or hydro-feminist lens, rethinking crypto-colonialist extractivism through the interconnectedness of bodies of water.
As an exhibition and installation, Cripto Sirenas expands into the physical space through an assemblage of different artifacts and media. The body and world as lovers and their transformations and mutations via technology become the central theme. Works are created through abstraction of the artist's bodies or by stilling their movement. Patterns created from documentary photographs and 3D stocks are printed onto fabrics, which morph into costumes for the performances within the video, and are then reconfigured into sculptural works depicting Sirena’s spirits in the exhibition space. Photographs of the artists’ bodies performing are abstracted and remade into geometric prints. Custom textile sculptures conceptualized by Sunny Pfalzer reference scenes from the video's choreography and morph into seating and cuddling sculptures for the visitors of the exhibition. A series of large mixed media collage works expands on the artists’ joint narrative and vision - here Ehrenstein collaborated with non-human agents through a plethora of tools and letting generative A.I. lead a conversation with documents of the performances, acrylic and oil painting, and textile prints. As with many of Ehrenstein’s works, collaboration, fluidity, and co-creation instead of individualism become a proposition for an alternative imagination of technology beyond extractivism, neocolonialism, and the accumulation of capital.