Dora Budor trained as an architect in her native city of Zagreb, yet in her immersive artworks she uses the language of “minor” architecture: rather than making buildings, she selectively takes them apart. In site-specific installations and interventions, space is animated to a disorienting effect. Describing her activities in the context of worldmaking – the process of creating new realities or fictions through the recycling of what already exists – Budor suggests a struggle in favour of the totality of the imagination. For The Milk of Dreams, Budor presents Autophones (2022) – resonant sculptures embedded with sex toys. Here, Budor imbues forms associated with industrial power with a sightless libidinal energy. Autophones are crafted in collaboration with a musical instrument workshop and shaped from wood selected for its specific acoustic properties; their enclosures are derived from moulds traditionally used for casting industrial machines, such as the now-inactive 20th-century air hammer visible nearby in the exhibition space. Referring to the Arsenale’s history as a complex of State-run military shipyards and armouries, the work interrelates industrial production, the privatisation of pleasure, and the mechanics of biopolitical control.
Madeline Weisburg
