Collective Mourning and Planetary Mourning. MONUMENT 0.6: Heterochrony

Collective Mourning and Planetary Mourning’s live arts programme is held in conjunction with the Community of Madrid’s 40th Autumn Festival and features the screening of the stage piece MONUMENT 0.6: Heterochrony, by Eszter Salamon, and the performance of Alex Baczyński-Jenkins’s dance piece Unending love, or love dies, on repeat like it’s endless. The project occasions experimentation with a sensitive approach to choreographic pieces and other physical practices which contend with different states of transit between life and death: the multiple and complex forms of mutual care; support for different states of mind stemming from loss; the invention of our own corporal or symbolic ritualisms which, upon being shared, resignify and establish new relational forms with life; and, finally, mourning as a state for perception and listening. 

Hungarian choreographer Eszter Salamon has been working on her Monuments series since 2014, a long-haul investigation which brings together, in the present day, eleven pieces in different formats, scales and textures. Through the series, Salamon sets forth an enquiry into the relationships between choreography and history — official and non-official — from different angles and, as a result, sets up a zone of study, physical experimentation and choreographic production. She assumes that the body, in the way it relates, establishes common movements and becomes formed in techniques and disciplines of order or disobedience, is a place from which to also read and listen to history.  

In this instance, the stage piece MONUMENT 0.6: Heterochrony is screened as we witness Salamon delve into the collectiveness of states of mourning and their transformative potential. A multi-voiced work which imagines a continuum between life and death, the co-existence of the living and the dead, and invents a utopian body: a dancing, acoustic body. The film joins echoes of archives of popular Sicilian music with choreographic impressions inspired by the mummification and conservation rituals of the Capuchin Catacombs of Palermo. It shows the details present in relations of proximity and intimacy between bodies, while also amplifying the sound dimension of the original stage piece, inviting spectators to become submerged in an imaginary sphere which juxtaposes the present time with traces of historical figures and place to, in Salamon’s words, “resist the abyss by means of casting memory through fiction”.

The screening will be followed by an encounter between the artist, Isabel de Naverán and Germán Labrador.  

The activity looks to kindle a reflection around the possibility of experiencing mourning through life destroyed on Earth. And under the premise that, to this effect, there is firstly a need to experience caring for the sick body and mourning not simply as something purely individual.  

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Eszter Salamon is a choreographer, artist and performer who lives and works between Berlin, Paris and Budapest and is a PhD Research Fellow at KHiO, the Oslo National Academy of the Arts. Her work evolves in different formats, aesthetics, methodologies and poetics, and in her practice Salamon deploys choreography as an activating and organisational agent with different methods such as image, sound, text, voice, the movement of bodies and actions. In 2019, she was awarded the Evens Art Prize and in 2020 was one of the artists selected inside the framework of the call La vie bonne of AWARE - Archives of Women Artists, Research and Exhibitions and the Centre national des arts plastiques (Cnap), France.

Germán Labrador has been the director of the Museo Reina Sofía’s Public Activities Department since 2021.

Isabel de Naverán is a dance researcher and since 2017 has been in charge of curating live arts in the Museo Reina Sofía’s Public Activities Department. 

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Credits

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Concept and artistic and choreographic direction:Eszter SalamonChoreography and performance:Matteo Bambi, Mario Barrantes Espinoza, Krisztiàn Gergye, Domokos Kovàcs, Csilla Nagy, Olivier Normand, Ayşe Orhon, Corey Scott-Gilbert and Jessica SimetTexts:Eszter Salamon, Elodie Perrin and Paul ÉluardMusic research:Eszter Salamon and Johanna PeineVoice work assistants:Johanna Peine and Ignacio JarquinMusical direction and arrangement:Ignacio JarquinDramaturgical support:Bojana CvejićRehearsal assistant:Christine De SmedtLighting design:Sylvie GarotSound:Marius Kirch and Felicitas HeckWardrobe design:Flavin BlankaTechnical direction:Matteo BambiProduction:Botschaft GbR/ Alexandra Wellensiek, Studio E.S/ Elodie PerrinFilming:César Vayssié

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