ESTUDIO II

 

I tear 
the throat 
they plunged 
into my body

Lupe Gómez, Disobedience, 1995

 

The Museo Reina Sofía presents the second edition of ESTUDIO, an annual programme which brings together work in a range of formats — stage pieces, performance lectures, readings, conversations — and is the outcome of research conducted by a series of artists and researchers whose practices are tied, either directly or dialogically, to the sphere of choreography and performance. 

Revolving around themes on the capacity to speak and utter, the violence involved in speaking up, the use and questioning of one’s own voice or the voice of others, feigned or simulated, when it flutters in the undetermined limit between the consideration of truth or lie, this edition of ESTUDIO looks to imagine new forms of listening and recognition. It stops before the perception of voices and sounds — seemingly non-human, produced from a human body — yielding to the attempt to leave oneself — leave verb and language, break the asymmetry between form and content — to search for a mental, vital rhythm, an enduring and shared exhalation. 

Over the course of an afternoon and evening, the research of four artists whose work is linked to voice will be presented, prompting an immersive journey through the limits where the word emerges, something half said or unsaid. Delving into a medium from the imperceptible howl of a brief spasm, a sound that coaxes and slows to become song, to become a wail, the physical stirring of phonemes, gestures akin to a sole animal, an over-linguistic effort, to live our relationships from uncertainty and vibration.

In a cumulus of intensities, the journey is set out inside three spaces in the Museo: one of the rooms of the Collection in the historical Sabatini Building, the former site of San Carlos Hospital, founded in the eighteenth century; the Garden; and the Protocol Room, in the contemporary Nouvel Building. The programme is concluded with a preliminary session in the form of conversations with the participating artists, bringing these essays closer to their areas of study.

PROGRAMME 
 

 

Tuesday, 20 October 2020 / From 10am to 2pm

Nouvel Building, Protocol Room
ESTUDIO in conversation

 

An encounter that seeks to bring the public in touch with different performance proposals, before they take place, by approaching fields of research that explore the array of projects presented. Thus, it puts forward a common space of learning in the form of a colloquium with speakers associated with the artists participating in the second edition of ESTUDIO. Approached around four conversations, it opens up reflections, formulates questions and shares references to detect and reveal common interests, connections and potential. In short, a journey through the limits where the word emerges.    

 

 

More information

 

 

Thursday, 22 October 2020 / From 5pm to 9pm 
 

Session 1 / Nouvel Building, Protocol Room 
The Breeze Carries Lies. Niño de Elche 
Lenght: 40’

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The breeze carries lies,
And let he who says he doesn’t lie
Tell you he doesn’t breathe
(Spanish folk song)

Heavy flamenco song, long song, song that belongs to someone, stolen voice, afillá (hoarse) voice, the voice this way, a gruff squawk, voice in song, voice of argument, ideal voice, the flamenco song written with spelling mistakes, personal song? The monkey sings from memory, song by right, oral voice, one’s own voice? Imaginary voice or voice of the mad, noisy voice, voice painted, strip back the voice, irate voice, legitimate voice, spiritual voice, voice of yarn, bastard song, regulated song, gifted song, ghostly song, spectral voice, voice of rubbish or voice of truth, sing another tune, common voice? Song of fire, physical voice, bloodied voice, spatial voice, deliberated voice, reflective voice, song of boy or girl, speechless voice, singular voice? Sing with no mouth, truthfully lying voice.

Niño de Elche

 

There is a lie attributed to forms of art-making, practices from which, paradoxically, a kind of purity or authenticity is demanded. The voice, in its materiality, takes on a channelling of this complexity, showing the being that it is blurred, shaped by impurities, haziness. But maybe it is these textures — those that show the fumbles of speech and thought — that make a being alive and changeable. The Breeze Carries Lies is an experimentation which, as in all experimental processes, is in progress and attempts to speak to us of the voice or voices as body, space and hope. Denying the veracity of the voice is to broaden its conception and thus be able to displace us towards places that encourage us to continue observing the quantity of linguistic, sound, conceptual, spatial and communicative possibilities it offers. Here it is about understanding the lie not as harmful per se, but as something that can grant us the constant possibility of discovering new paths from which to rethink our new forms of social, cultural and political relations.  

  

 

 

Session 2 / Sabatini Building, Room 102 
Tutuguri. Flora Détraz 
Length: 25’

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Produced at the crossroads between the vocal cords and physical movement of the body, in an exercise to “listen” how a dance sounds, Tutuguri is a polyphonic performance that takes its title from Tutuguri. The Rite of the Black Sun (1936), the well-known poem by Antonin Artaud.

Tutuguri explores the asynchronism between movements and sounds, in a perpetual conflict of opposites where the body of the person dancing is inhabited by whispers, animal grunts, child noises, strange sounds, conversations, song, and abdominal sounds that transport us to a spectral landscape of voices, sketching a state of connection between sound flows and affection.     

 

 

 

Session 3 / Sabatini Building, Garden 
Souffle(s)! [Delusions of (a) Garden]. Loreto Martínez Troncoso 
Length: 35’

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Martínez Troncoso responds to the invitation to continue exploring the relationships between action and language, between orality and body gestures, with a proposal conceived for this edition of ESTUDIO, upon which she reflects with the following words:

(And the formulation of these words does not come easily, similar to having a lump in your throat).

I recall a few years back the silence that settled in my throat as I became open-mouthed1… silence from dryness? Today this silence settles through a closed mouth, a full mouth. In a closed mouth no air can get in and, on a du mal à respirer! The nares still remain. What would my nares say if they could speak?

(so much time for so few words to be formulated, although words are not that much because there are many words here inside, but the tension or attention of how one feels at the time… [delirium of a garden])

— …ma bouche est un creux, a garden, a hole, an inside and outside, an over- and underground, land or a den to clear, oxygenate, caress.

(I imagine this coming 22 October with wind, touching and caressing our skin...)

With souffle I entitle or call — perhaps it is a calling — this moment, which in Spanish means: breath, breathing, blowing, wind… and with the exclamation mark of its verb souffler: Blow! Breathe Out! Huff! Puff! Growl! Snort! Breathe! Breathe in! Take a breath! Push! Fly! Fly away!   

1Avoir le souffle coupé, literal translation: to be short of breath.

 

 

Session 4 / Sabatini Building, Room 102
Speak to Me, Body. Nazario Díaz
Length: 50’

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I propose an act of resistance by tying aspects such as the phonetic transformation of my vocal flow, the notion of circularity or the idea of purging through perseverance, placing my body in collision with language and a certain will for geographical and identity oscillation.

Nazario Díaz

Speak to Me, Body is part of Looking for Pepe, a study that started in 2016 and sets out from the figure of Córdoba artist Pepe Espaliú (1955–1993), unfurling a series of investigations around the body, language and territory.  

The work takes its title from the text Juan Vicente Aliaga wrote in conjunction with the exhibition held in Pabellón Mudéjar in Seville in homage to Espaliú in 1994, a year after his death from AIDS-related complications. The interest in how Espaliú developed links between his work and his circumstances, marked by illness, at a social and political period undergoing a major transformation, inspires a work linked to the subject matter that mutates or disappears, and the idea of the erosion and restraint of a body understood as physical and social existence.    

Looking for Pepe opens out from the mutual involvement of Jorge Gallardo, Jesús Alcaide, Cuqui Jerez, María Jerez, Isaak Erdoiza and Ion Munduate; and Speak to Me, Body has gestated as research inside the framework of the 2016/2017 MA in Performing Arts and Visual Culture and was premiered on 29 November 2018 in Elipsiak, a series curated by Isabel de Naverán for Azkuna Zentroa, Bilbao.