There is still time for several of the glasses to begin to shatter against the ground, as they fall from a small platform that separates the two spaces that delimit the artistic action -a kind of split stage- surrounded like a U by the public that gathered for this inauguration: before this apotheosis, the performers dance and contort around the place, while some voices, some texts are heard, since this production is the reversal of another famous performance.
“What we did was remake the work ‘Mi fiesta’ by Mayra Bonard and Carlos Casella and we have found, from this interdisciplinary place, a way to reflect what the Ides universe is,” Andrea Saltiel, artistic director of Prodanza, tells Télam.
The tribute to Ides Kilen recreates an iconic scene from that work: the walk, the transit, the trajectory that draws a line and an extraordinary meaning of its own. The piece -this one and that one too- alludes to the fragility of materials, transparency, sound, bodies, light and the world of two women, in the same time and space.
At 105 years old, Kihlen is the oldest active artist in Argentina. In her works, she combines music and painting, two disciplines to which she dedicated her entire life, from her beginnings at the Ernesto de la Cárcova Higher School of Visual Arts, where she trained with teachers such as Pío Collivadino, Juan Batlle Planas and Emilio Pettoruti. She made her first exhibition only at the age of 83 and since then, her productions have not stopped circulating around the world.
“It was very organic to enter the universe of Ides with this work that combines dance and performance, since she is an artist who contains a crossover of languages in her daily life, between painting and music, between the staff and composition, present in their works. We find it very interesting to bring the canvas to the scenic space, thus connecting all these disciplines of the arts,” added Saltiel, in her role as general director of reversion, which also focuses on the limit of the uncertain.
In this same space on Avenida de Mayo -former headquarters of the newspaper La Prensa, recognized for its monumental lamppost with the female figure of Minerva, which crowns the building- there is also a video installation by the duo Lolo and Lauti, which they titled “Misdeeds “, an ode to the Buenos Aires night linked to the theater scene on Corrientes Avenue.
The exhibition presents a small wooden Obelisk located in the center of the room, where a projector is hidden from which the images that are reflected on the wall of the room come out: a video that shows how several figures that carry his head iconic porteño constructions.
“It’s a performative skyline of Buenos Aires. The Obelisk is drunk or intoxicated and dances with its building friends,” say the authors, while they complete the sentences among themselves, in the audio guide that accompanies the work, one of the novelties of the Week Of art.
Thus, the Barolo, the Kavanagh building, the Mill, the National Library, the IBM tower and the Congress represent a sort of architectural party that also pays homage to local heritage. “The Buenos Aires theater was a refuge for the queer space,” add Lolo and Lauti, about this piece also located on Avenida de Mayo, the same one on which Federico García Lorca premiered his creations, they detail.
“Misdeeds” is one of the ten works by artists that were selected through a call -to which 300 projects were applied- and that function as the central beacon of the Week: distributed in different emblematic points of the capital, these pieces were located in cultural institutions but also in gardens, parks, theaters, subways and other Buenos Aires locations.
As soon as you walk down Santa Fe Avenue and just take a look inside the Botanical Garden it is possible to find another of the selected works, the monumental “Pyra de la Gran Witch”, a four-meter sculpture made of wood, plaster and wire – at its base it has a series of firewood and branches to make a campfire – creation of Tótem Tabú, an artistic group made up of Hernán Soriano, Malena Pizani and Laura Códega.
In the middle of the green, of all kinds of plant species that grow in one of the most important gardens in Buenos Aires, this figure of a colossal, powerful and autonomous woman is located under a pyre, in reference to the burning of witches that took place carried out for centuries against any woman who stepped out of the strict social roles prescribed for her.
Throughout history, these women were turned to ashes. The work is inspired by the dolls called saints to wear that are found inside churches, detailed the artists, who decided to place it in this garden, alluding to their magical and medicinal practices, their herbalist knowledge, to an analogous environment in which they moved in the past.
“In the pyre, the manifesto of the annihilation of what is undesirable for the established order or in search of establishing itself is specified,” they explain from Tótem Tabú, who have been working since 2014 investigating issues related to the origin of certain prohibitions with the aim of shedding light on those knowledge and ideologies censored by history and see how these dialectics survive today.
Meanwhile, in the neighborhood of La Boca, in front of the riverbank, in the midst of the most stunning sets and costumes of the Teatro Colón, the play “Lossterios de Udolfo” is located -as part of the Art Week-. of the artist Verónica Gomez, where it can be visited on Friday, September 30, Saturday, October 1, and Sunday, October 2, from 3 to 6 pm, with reservation of tickets, at Colón Fábrica (Avenida Pedro de Mendoza 2163).
It is an oil painting on a large-format canvas -two meters high by five wide- along with some fifteen handwritten pages with quotes from the same book that gives the work its name, by Ann Radcliffe, a British writer. of the eighteenth century, pioneer of the gothic horror novel.
“While I was reading the work, of more than 700 pages, I was painting this canvas in parallel, trying to guide myself by the spirit of the novel, which is gothic and gloomy, and which can be read as a rather abstract landscape, with shapes, cavernous, with enough contrasts of light and shadow, with somber tones. In the quotes from the novel I concentrated on taking those descriptions of the atmosphere of the landscape, which seemed to me that they could account for the mood and environmental state of the characters, “he says to Télam the author.
The mega painting, and the quotes from the book, were scattered throughout different points of this mega cultural space where the Colón houses, in public view, the sets of its most famous stagings, from Turandot to La Boheme.
“Summits wrapped in clouds or showing strange silhouettes sometimes getting lost hidden by vapors that sometimes shone in the blue reflection of the air,” Gómez recites, about some of the quotes that the public will find in the place, also reflected in the monumental painting . And he continues: “Watching as the valley disappeared into darkness, the waters meeting the sky offered a faded purple hue. The last purple streak of day across the melancholy West fades slowly.” Radcliffe wrote in 1794.
“The whole novel has a very scenographic aspect, with haunted castles, cursed characters, ghosts and forests with twisted branches. The ruins of all the Gothic paraphernalia and the fact that it is located in the Colón Fábrica -where the sets of the operas at the Teatro Colón – is very appropriate”, he reflects.
The official closing of the art week -organized by the Ministry of Culture together with the Medifé Foundation- will be with a performance entitled “Vivir Vende” by Mayra Bonard’s Natural Selection Company, on Tuesday, October 4 at 7:00 p.m., at Fundación Santander (Paseo Colón Avenue 1380) in the framework of the “Amphibians” exhibition. The complete program can be consulted at vivamoscultura.buenosaires.gob.ar.
Source: Ambito
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