Monstersweet Worlds 2015-2021
Over the course of six years collaborators Monika Czyzyk and Torsten Zenas Burns, participated in two residency programs that functioned as a catalyst for an ongoing variable art project called Monstersweet.
The original locations for production were Signal Culture in NY, USA and Escape Residency on Vartiosaari island located in Helsinki, Finland. During these initial experiences the artists explored through real time video recordings, drawings and digital image production a variety of relationships between imagined post-humans
and their ecological environments.
Over the years Czyzyk and Burns have expanded the idea creating unique single channel and looped videos about an ongoing migrating residency program called Monstersweet. Within this fictional studio program they have collaborated with chimeric residents in several countries including Mexico, Cuba, United States, Greece, Italy and Germany filming and photographing ambiguous travelogues, passionate interspecies love and communication rituals enacted by a diverse group of humanimals. The captured video scenes and sculptural work, both grotesque and humorous explore reimagined biologies, manifestations of performative selfie culture and intimate portraits of a globally transformed ecosystems.