“Spice Pooja”
Live video installation
April 18, 2013

'Spice Pooja' is a live video performance presented by Martine Fougeron in a big independant room, on a big screen at The Hole Gallery.

Revealed at The Hole Gallery in New York City on April 18, 2013.

This artist's video was Commissioned by Manjoor Estate- Haute Spice-.

" I modeled the film on the idea of performing a live pooja of offerings to the bottle, by showering it with the juices and fantastic spices it would contain. I was inspired by the ancient Vedic poojas I had witnessed in temples in Tamil Nadu, the Southern province of India where I had lived many months over the past years and where Sunitha was born.

'Spice Pooja' is the live performance I created and filmed.
I wanted the pooja to be genuine, in time and space. There is no artifice. All the ingredients were on a table, in order of apparition, in function of their weight, color and viscosity for the aesthetic layering and lingering on the bottle. I set the bottle on my Lalique bowl which served as a pedestal. One assistant was passing the spices and the other was delicately pouring them over the bottle.
The pooja lasted short of five minutes but the orchestration was so intense that it seemed like an hour. There was only one pooja.

I wanted one unbroken slow sensual take with the noble ingredients emanating from a higher plane and reverently adorning the bottle with a Haute Spice Robe -a metaphor for the worship of one's self-.

I filmed the 'Spice Pooja' as I performed the ceremony for Manjoor Estate, as an inaugural blessing for this start-up company who creates Haute-Spice juices.