Catalina Tuca. The Sensitive Project. 2020-23. Participatory archive. 3D prints, animation, interview.

Launched during a moment of heightened anxiety around suboptical agency wrought by the Covid-19 pandemic, Catalina Tuca’s The Sensitive Project renders emotions as material objects; granting shape, texture, and scale to weighty invisible feelings through an interdisciplinary process involving recorded interviews, 3D modeling and 3D printing. Tuca writes, “Reconsidering sub-valued notions of the role of emotions in our societies, the project exposes a global intimacy through the interpretation and translation of the invisible into digital and material corporeality.” Accessible in physical and digital variants, the project website houses documentary-style monologues of participants verbalizing their sensations with descriptive and metaphorical language, accompanied by digital 3D models that Tuca works with a team of modelers to model and animate. Participants are subsequently offered an edition of their materialized emotions to take with them.