If I die, please delete my Soundcloud (2019)

"Working with the language and aesthetics of online confessional text, Natasha Matila-Smith considers disembodied displays of emotion in the online world, often looking at the tropes of romance. For If I die, please delete my Soundcloud, Matila-Smith’s texts indicate the internet’s lure as both an embodiment of and escape from loneliness.

Looking at intimacy in a time where the curation of online identities is not only commonplace but expected, it seems the possibility to reinvent and self-censor are both endless and even imminent. With our lives are so intertwined with cyberspace in quite a banal way, the artist’s work sees interest in examining how these online personalities intersect with real-world ones and what this means for modern identities and wider society.

Previous works talk of societal expectations relating to ‘love’ and the lexicon of the romantic, typically involving Matila-Smith as an ‘actor’ being performatively emotional online. The diaristic text similarly has become a site that signifies intimacy. Oversharing, expression, emotional, loneliness, a desire for companionship; all have become synonymous with online meme culture and internet identities, but so too have they always been negatively identified as feminine traits. As demonstrated in many of my works the public oversharing becomes a device which questions the divide between public and intimate, between ‘documentation’ and ‘curated’; it has also become a way to interrogate the realm of ‘women’s craft’."