Yolanda Ross is an interdisciplinary project that moves from sculptural installation through performance into video.
Yolanda Ross draws from a fictional narrative, a story that unfolds across different forms.
Yolanda Ross is a tennis player.
Chameleonic—but a tennis player.
Yolanda Ross is a chimera. A mythological body that accumulates powers. To an inherent androgyny is added a large chameleon head.
Yolanda Ross echoes Roland Garros.
Yolanda Ross is the protagonist of this story.
A story told so that things add up.
Yolanda Ross is coquettish, self-aware—hardly unusual for her kind.
Yolanda Ross is, has been, and will remain a fantasy.
A fantasy that feeds on reason, only to bend it.
Yolanda Ross is also a killer. Armed with an indestructible racket, she enters into a lethal game against a fragile glass installation.
What drives her remains unclear.
Only she knows.
With the help of a ball machine, she attempts to destroy the structure during a performance-match. The game unfolds under constraint: the oversized chameleon mask disrupts her vision and balance, producing a choreography that is at once clumsy and precise.
Between ritual, seduction, and calculated violence, the match continues.
Yolanda Ross is all of this—and more.
The scene unfolds under a cold light.
Hard—and equally cold, the voice of the narrator.
The stage is configured as a tennis court in green carpet, structured and defined by its lines—slightly thinner than those of a conventional court. It is presented frontally. The net divides, with pride, a perfectly symmetrical space.
Blatantly artificial.
Behind it sits the CHAIR UMPIRE, storyteller of the first act. Dressed in immaculate black, he blends into the background, absorbed by a dense darkness. Precisely centred, elevated above the stage on his high chair.
White:- Tennis is an exercise in triangulation.
Red:- Tennis is an exercise in domination and submission.
(Silence)
UMPIRE: Red, fifteen.
White, love.
White, love.