Eszter Salamon

In a dialogue with the exhibition Defiant Muses. Delphine Seyrig and the Feminist Video Collectives in France in the 1970s and 1980s, curated by Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez and Giovanna Zapperi, Museo Reina Sofía presents Monument 0.7: M/Others (2019), by choreographer Eszter Salamon.

In 2018, the curatorial and editorial platform If I Can’t Dance I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution, from Amsterdam, together with researcher and curator Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez, invited Salamon to conceive a performance that would converse with the unfinished project of the actress, video artist and feminist activist Delphine Seyrig (1932–1990): a silent black-and-white film she started in the 1980s, entitled Calamity, and based on the letters Calamity Jane (1852–1902), a well-known frontierswoman and pioneer of the Wild West, wrote to her daughter Jean McCormick (1873–1951).    

The response to such an invitation comes in the form of Monument 0.7: M/Others, which is, in turn, the seventh utterance in the series Monuments, which Salamon started in 2014. Conceived as a long-term project addressing the plurality of formats and durations, the series constitutes an approach to different figures from the history of dance and art, such as the dancer, artist and actress Valeska Gert (1892–1978) or the dancer and actress Valda Setterfield (1934). It does not aim, however, to serve as an homage, but instead looks to set forth different ways of approaching the history of the movement to bring it into the present, incorporating issues related to identity, memory and authenticity.   

The piece will be followed by a conversation with the artist, presented and moderated by Isabel de Naverán.

Participants

Erzsébet Gyarmati is a Physical Education and Biology teacher, dance instructor and education expert. Fifty years ago, she began to engage with Hungarian folk dance, teaching and performing to make the genre become part of basic education in Hungary. With her students, she founded the Szàzszorszép Dance Ensemble, a company which recently celebrated its fortieth anniversary. She was also founder and director of the Martonvàsàr School of Arts, Hungary, from 1993 to 2000. From 1994 to 1997, she participated as Hungarian coordinator of MUS-E, a music and education project Yehudi Menuhin carried out in nine countries, with the aim of promoting creativity and tolerance through the arts. She is the author of different books on Hungarian folk dance education, for instance Games and Dance in School I-IV (2001). Furthermore, in 2005 she was part of Eszter Salamon’s piece Magyar Tàncok, performing in a number of countries.

Eszter Salamon is a choreographer, artist and performer who lives between Berlin, Paris and Brussels. She uses choreography as an activating and organising agency between different languages, such as image, sound, music, text, voice and body movements. Her work evolves via different formats, aesthetics, methodologies and poetics, setting in motion a wide spectrum of expressions. Since 2002, she has created solos and larger-scale works, which have been performed internationally at festivals, arts venues and museums, for instance Festival d'Automne à Paris, Avignon Festival, Ruhrtriennale / PACT Zollverein in Germany, the Holland Dance Festival, the Centres Pompidou in Paris and Metz, The Kitchen and MoMA in New York, HAU Hebbel am Ufer Berlin, The Place in London, the Serralves Foundation in Porto and the Cartier Foundation in Paris, among others. Since 2014, she has been working on a series of pieces that seek to rethink the idea of monument and, in the words of the artist, “re-hallucinate” history. In this series of works in different formats, durations and forms of presentation, memory is invoked to assemble the ghosts of identity, authenticity and origin. Eszter Salamon is artist-in-residence in Théâtre Nanterre-Amandiers. She is the laureate of the Evens Art Prize 2019.