The traditional Coca Cola bottle, whose sinuous shape recalls the silhouette of the female body, remained popular throughout the 20th century. It has become a kind of quintessential icon of consumer society and, depending on one’s point of view, either celebrated or considered a symbol to be destroyed. From Andy Warhol onwards it has also formed part of the iconography of contemporary art. Photos by Dan Wrightson & Ela Bialkowska

At the Enopolio (wine cooperative) of Poggibonsi, Mexican artist Damián Ortega is showing 120 variations on the theme, produced to his designs by local crystal workers. He has always been interested in how alterations in form determine a change in the meanings and functions of everyday objects, and here he introduces us to a universe of bizarre forms, where the requisite standards of contemporary industrial production – including the recognizable form which with time has become a reassuring sign of reliability for the consumer – are undermined. The bottles become human bottles, and the focus shifts to the relations between the standardized body and forms of craft manipulation; these involve a wide variety of treatments, ranging from scarification to torture.
Starting with his choice of the number, which recalls the literary world of De Sade (The 120 Days of Sodom but also the cinema version by Pasolini), Ortega presents a world of surprises where the bottles/bodies are assembled according to groups, according to the transformation of one or another part of the body – the mouth, the neck, the skin, the organs … the body as battlefeld.