Luciana Janaqui news | introduction | projects | biography | contact counseling reflection 2020, HD video (audio recording of interpreters interpreting words by Korean cosmetic surgeons into Japanese, film sequence of the artist re-enacting it with digital images inserted), 26 minutes 8 seconds I am interested in overlaps and exchanges of experiences and stories (memories) between individual bodies (devices). In my work, through visual and textual elements, I install memory contents of others (one or multiple at a time) into myself, questioning the ownership of information stored in a particular body and observing the peculiarity of a versionalized subject, especially through the gap that arises inevitably. As a whole, my practice is an attempt to take a new look at the world through countless versions of the “self” that oscillate across the Internet through fragmentation and pluralization, deconstructing and reconstructing the relationship between mind and body. Process: 1. Have a series of counseling sessions at different cosmetic surgery clinics in Korea; record each conversation between the surgeon and me,    mediated by a female interpreter. 2. Edit the resultant sound files by using only the parts where the female interpreters speak and connecting them into a sequence. 3. Film myself using a “beauty-enhancing” smartphone app while lip-syncing to the edited audio; create a video piece with referential images    inserted additionally. In the winter of 2018, when I was 30 years old, I visited Korea with an idea of having cosmetic surgery with the money I had saved up, 1,000,000 yen, although finally I decided not to do it. Now that a few years have passed, I may be less attractive visually, but capable of dealing with life, with my obsession for beauty having diminished. Recently, I had a chance to listen to the sound files after a long time. I then realized that although I could understand only from the words by the female interpreters, all the topics (such as which parts of my face need to be improved, what kind of face I should pursue, etc.) are the exact things that troubled and fascinated me around that time. Still remaining in my head as a fermented curse, so to speak, those words were indeed uttered―but from whom (surgeons, interpreters, or people in society in general) to whom (me as a person, me as a customer, or women in society in general) exactly? Each counseling turned out as superficial and role-playing as every communication in human society. In the video, I give away my role of a patient and take the role of a counselor instead, constructing a nested structure. It is in a sense an attempt to incorporate and embody the “enhanced selfie” culture (in which an image of one’s face beautified with a smartphone app is used as one’s avatar). Throughout the video, tiny fragments of the voices of the surgeons are heard now and then, as an unavoidable residue from the editing ―in a literally ghostly way.