CLICK HERE TO SEE ALL THE IMAGES OF ZANJÓN
ZANJÓN 2009
En las fotografías que constituyen el proyecto titulado ZANJÓN se muestra a lo largo del paseo de la República o también llamado Zanjón, (una de las avenidas más importantes de Lima), los jardines que decoran los laterales de dicha avenida. Son 6 kilómetros de norte a sur (o viceversa) que permiten llegar desde el centro antiguo de la ciudad hasta el Océano Pacífico. La construcción de esta vía rápida está sumergida o cavada, por lo que en sus laterales se han empleado pequeñas porciones de jardines y céspedes que pretenden dar un toque de "lujo" a todo el árido recorrido. Lo paradójico se encuentra cuando la practicidad de un espacio se entremezcla con lo estético. Diferentes compañías se han apoderado de su porción de césped y a cambio de su mantenimiento (y por lo tanto de su existencia) se han adueñado del diseño del verde que les corresponde. Nos encontramos con el control y la privatización de los escasos márgenes libres, políticamente libres, mediante un proceso de domesticación publicitaria de la naturaleza. De esta manera cada una de las parcelas representan, con el diseño y color de sus plantas, la publicidad de su empresa benefactora, respondiendo así, al logo o al nombre del negocio que sponsoriza su supervivencia. Ironia/tragedia contemporánea. Incluso los espacios libres, la libertad frente a la arquitectura y su lógica especulativa, para serlo (y dejar de serlo) tienen que estar esponsorizados.
Private Collection Seckenberg Museum Frankfurt am Main
BÖRUS 2007
Following my former work Palmehuset, during my stay in Frankfurt I carried out the photos Börus. This project consists of a series of photos in one of Frankfurt´s skyscrapers. In this work, plants have taken over the space where thousands of clerks are working. Plants invaded the offices, the receptions, the elevators and the corridors. In Palmehuset I explain the concept of survival in a concrete space, isolated from any external reality, where the plants develop their life form and adjust to the shapes of the greenhouse manufactured for them away from their natural surroundings. Nevertheless, in my work Börus I intend to go further transforming directly the physical space and giving it a new reality in itself. Plants substitute the people working in these spaces, which are equally imposed, isolating this reality to create a new one. The office buildings, which architecture curiously is very similar to the greenhouse structure, contain their workers, and during the office hours transforms them into species fighting to push forward within this world, subordinating to it. The same process of natural selection takes place, where the strongest or best adapted species are more successful when it comes to survival.
“Palmehuset” means Palm House in Danish. This work, which started in Norway in the botanic garden of Bergen is a tour between hot and cold, wild and structured, between liberty and the strictest order. But they are also images showing the power of adaptation, coexistence and survival. In my work, which shows a series of places, life experiences or intentions, schemes of what you look at. Palmehuset are Palm Houses in European cities, above all in Northern Europe like Norway, Denmark, Germany and Austria. These greenhouses, located inside botanical gardens, often forgotten, revive old times when species of far away places were kept like large living treasures. Every important family during the 18th and 19th century possessed its own “Garden of Delights”, as an exotic luxury. Following the line of my work about the world of luxury with its relation to a decadent past, the botanic garden remains like an island within the modern cities with their frenetic life, exploitation and selfishness.
In the Palm Houses there is also selfishness, selfishness for the space, the colours, the texture of their leaves, the light. In these places light is what gives life – just as on the photo – to each of the species pushing upward, maybe to flee and go back to where they were brought from. The leaves expand and the flowers flourish in a brutal, almost aggressive manner within these glass cages which structure, arrange and file them. In reality it is this struggle between the search for freedom, between the wild, between the chaos which we belong to against the order, the iron structure which doesn’t let us escape from the established rules. Beyond these rules there is again chaos and frenetic life. And this way the struggle smoothly turns into coexistence, where the tubes turn into roots and the water lily leaves into fountains. The colours melt into green and light brown and the oxides of the metals is surrounded by green. The iron structure containing this life orgy is slowly becoming organic but only towards its interiors, only its bowels breathe the oxygen of the plants, towards outside it remains steady, cold but gorgeous.
Maybe this controversy doesn’t get us anywhere, just like the paths which lead to nowhere. Is it struggle for the sake of struggle? The straight line can lead us to the infinite space but the curve can abandon us between flower pots and stale water.
My look in Palmehuset intends to express that if there is a struggle, it is for something that we cannot renounce, the survival of our beliefs, the liberty we are destined for, liberty we sometimes suffer for but which we cannot run away from. Some species with more force, others from the soil or the floor tiles, but all of them grow, develop and create pompous forms full of lust like Bosch showed in his painting “Garden of Earthly Delights”.
CLICK HERE TO SEE ALL THE IMAGES OF JOURNAL DE HOTEL
Journal de Hotel consist of more than 40 photographs of beds in luxury hotels around the world. The series forms a sort of travel diary within a context temporarily given by circumstances of life in which each moment of these “stops” is captured and accumulates, as the Baudelairian flaneur accumulates experience, observing and feeling that life goes by.
In the pretentious decors that have always been part of the world of luxury, the ordinary experience that takes place in them subverts the meaning for which such sumptuous setting are so proudly created. Despite the impersonality of these places, a world of intimacy is presented, gently lit by bedside lamps, whose influence is such as to recall a dream of which an image remains when one wakes up, like a memory. Such was the origin of this diary in these non-places that belong to no one, but which in the end are as much yours as your own memories.
At a poetic level, little static set designs are presented which, rather than conveying anything anecdotal about the location, are accessed through personal aspects. This passage between the intimate and the impersonal makes the situation of the context ironic. It also involves the choice to show intimate things, but not in the perhaps harsh way of Tracey Emin. A more silent world is presented with a cold gaze. It unfolds among motifs marked with “distinction” but it has left traces of what it may have been –a presence of experience.
Little by little we approach a reflection on the world of luxury. This hotel environment that so strongly represents all that is impersonal, all that is neutral, becomes central to answering a question that would cover several aspects of what we are thinking. What is luxury today? The concept of luxury may remain or change in the context of our history. But it is true that in the last few years the very meaning of luxury has changed, and perhaps been globalized, losing one of its most distinctive features: namely exclusivity. Luxus is “excess”, but don’t we live in the era of excess, of accumulation? Accordingly images of beds are accumulated, with no change in viewpoint and yet differently lived in. Just as we all end up modelling our own concept of luxury on what we regard as exclusive in respect of our experience, we are driven to share luxury, even to spread it about within a certain aesthetic.
Through “Journal de Hotel” we approach a reflection on the world of luxury, a complex self-portrait of emotion and autobiography, an iconography of what is phantasmagoric about human presence, and ultimately, a rather optimistic view of passion in everyday life.
TECHNIQUE OF THE PRODUCTION:
The pictures of the video Sonate nº1 “Augenmusik” K505 (visual music) are structured according to the Sonata form, composed in a ternary structure: exposition, bridge, development of the theme, bridge, recapitulation and the Coda final. The sound follows the structural dictum, combining the composition of new sound effects with the sound of the ambience of the very place.
The impressions of the Mozarteum in Salzburg like the ambience, and especially the light of the place overwhelmed me and made me imagine a Sonata in a key minor, probably one in A minor. This way I could add the Coda final composed as a small minuet for contrabass. Finally the Sonata gained its definite and aesthetic character with the minuet in A minor accentuating the principal key and the translation of the whole into pictures. Actually, these kind of information might give the video a more technical or anecdotal character. Since I had the wish to reassure myself of my musical education I intended to make a fusion of both fields, each one of them keeping their characteristics in an interpretation.
SYNOPSIS:
The Music transfers us easily into the world of pictures. Many times we hear sounds, songs and other pieces of music and our minds fill up with interpretations drifting by the clouds of our neutrons. Maybe it is much more difficult the other way round, a state of mind in which melodies come into our head when we look at pictures. But sometimes it happens. There are sounds connected with certain images, but there are not like symbols reflecting the sound; they are rather like emotions. But they are not even representatives of what made them generate this noise. These sounds carry emotions along themselves, which are buried and hidden in our memory. They emerge to the surface whenever we enter our mazy auditory systems. Then they carry us to distant places or lock us up in a luminous room where imagination is the mistress of every wall. Doesn’t this sound quite poetical? But is it not the poetry that makes us leaving the prejudging manner behind and enables us to have these feelings? It may be concealed, but it is there, hiding behind a side door. Behind it one might catch a glimpse of a long resonant floor.
The piece “Augenmusik” which signifies visual music is overcrowded with floors. We could walk slowly along these floors and allow ourselves to let our own fantasies ascent between pentatonic scales. Their presence makes us feel like they were creating these pictures by themselves. When we let them go these voices drift all along the dark floor, crossing between the various luminous materials, from one door to another. But our life keeps progressing and as we keep following our path the voices keep on mixing among themselves, getting filled up with our pas every time a little more. One just has to let them go until they make themselves visible. Then they will appear in the far distance only to descent the majestic stairs of our imagination.
FICHA TÉCNICA
Título de la obra. Sonate nº 1 “Augenmusik” K505
Autora: Paula Anta
Duración: 8’33’’
Montaje: Daniel Silvo y Paula Anta
Contrabajo: Pablo Martín-Caminero
Música y sonido: Pablo Martín-Caminero y Paula Anta
Agradecimientos: Elger Esser, Stiftung Mozarteum Salzburg, Dr. Stephan Pauly, Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac.
Risoletto es un video realizado como colaboración para el último proyecto del colectivo LHFA (Fernando Baena y Rafael Burillo) partiendo de imágenes filmadas de una performance de otro colectivo, Los Torreznos (Rafael Lamata y Jaime Vallaure).
A partir de una idea conceptual, estética y formal muy diferentes ya dadas, se ha creado un nuevo contexto y una nueva significación, otorgando, de esta manera, una nueva visión conceptual, estética y formal. El punto de partida tanto de la performance de Los Torreznos como de las imágenes grabadas por LHFA estaban totalmente inherentes a mi proyecto final. De esta manera, me he enfrentado a un material cuyo nacimiento y desarrollo era totalmente ajeno a lo que luego iba a significar, como idea final. Se encuentra así la dificultad de comenzar un recorrido dentro del proceso creativo de uno mismo a través de unos márgenes muy marcados, en este caso, por otros artistas, que al mismo tiempo desconocen lo que va a suceder con su material bruto. Así mismo, la estructura que conlleva grabar una performance en video, hace tener que plantearse, al realizar este proyecto, el destruir un hilo conductor de una historia o por lo menos una idea, para hacerla tuya y recrear un nuevo concepto de esas imágenes en movimiento dentro de el lenguaje personal y estético de uno mismo.
En Risoletto, como en todos mis videos, la idea parte del sonido. Las imágenes se han estructurado una a una, según cada nota de las partes más conocidas de la célebre ópera de Rigoletto de Verdi. De esta manera, a través de la edición, he podido contextualizar a los representantes de la performance, Rafael Lamata y Jaime Vallaure, dentro de un espectáculo operístico al que estaban totalmente ajenos al realizar su acción. Al mismo tiempo, el contenido que transcurre de fondo, que de igual manera está cargado de significaciones, ha sido manipulado hasta el punto de crear una tensión con sus dinámicas, sus descansos y sus silencios, imitando así, a lo que nos encontraríamos en cualquier concierto de música clásica.
CONCEPTO
Una de las ideas principales de mi obra es la observación y crítica de determinadas estructuras de nuestra sociedad, que llevadas a determinados límites pierden su propio sentido. Tanto en mi trabajo Journal de Hotel, donde me recreo en una mirada irónica sobre el mundo del lujo, como en mi reciente proyecto Palmehuset, donde se apunta a un mundo de contrastes y supervivencia de una manera desapercibida, se intenta mostrar la controversia a la que a veces -y cada día más en una sociedad absorbida por el consumo- nos enfrentamos sin habernos percatado que el verdadero sentido de ciertas estructuras ya muy establecidas en nuestras costumbres pierden su propio sentido hasta el punto de volverse absurdas e incluso cómicas.
En este video he querido mostrar una visión cínica, que se transforma en cómica, de lo que se consideran mundos intachables o cultos, como puede ser el de la música clásica. Debido a mi formación musical, conozco el tipo de idealización, en un sentido general de la palabra, que se le otorga a ciertas ramas de la música. Solamente hay que leer en la mayoría de los libros de música cómo a la “música clásica” se la denomina “música culta”. De esta forma no quiero criticar la música clásica, que ha marcado muchos años de mi vida, sino a la forma de volverse un acto, una costumbre o una certidumbre asentada, en algo absurdo por su elevación dentro de una sociedad que ha perdido en muchos aspectos el baremo y la cordura para juzgar.
Los interpretes de esta ópera se ríen de su entorno, de su música, de su público (que al mismo tiempo es el espectador del video) y hasta de sí mismos. Se muestran desnudos ante una orquesta paralítica (que interpreta la famosa obra 4’33’’ de John Cage) y que al mismo tiempo se ríe de un contexto en el que la música es lo de menos. De esta manera, y doblemente descontextualizado, escuchamos como este Aria de Verdi se desintegra arrasando consigo a los intérpretes que alcanzan su cúspide interpretativa con el auge de sus carcajadas.
El mundo de la música es un mundo maravilloso en el que podemos naufragar confiadamente un nuestras propias marañas de sentimientos e imágenes. Pero a veces, al elevarnos al punto de vista de espectadores y asomarnos a esos palacios de audiciones que llamamos auditorios, esperamos, pasivos, que esa música se deshaga de las propias ataduras a las que, a veces, la sometemos. La música, su interpretación, es algo que creemos fuera de nuestro alcance y los auditorios (al igual que los museos) funcionan como mansiones de la nobleza abiertas al público durante unas horas. El grado de “nobleza” puede variar, pero en cuanto una obra se interpreta en un auditorio (o se lleva a un museo), adquiere el misterio de un modo de vida que excluye a las masas.
FICHA TÉCNICA
Título: Risoletto
Autora: Paula Anta
En colaboración con los colectivos: LHFA
(La Hostia Fine Arts),
Fernando Baena y Rafal Burillo y Los Torreznos, Rafael Lamata y Jaime Vallaure.
Duración: 4’33’’
Montaje: Paula Anta
Música: Xavier Souto y Paula Anta
Interlocutor: Xavier Souto
ntérpretes: Xavier Souto y Paula Anta
Agradecimientos: Carlos Tmori
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Recent Comments
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Científico Juan said:
[esto es genial]En momentos concretos de mi audición de este bello video musical (canon)…la voz femenina me recuerda a una de mis... read more
on Sonate nº1 "Augenmusik" K505 -
Científico Juan said:
[esto es genial]Bellas formas…me recuerda otros tiempos más tranquilos y sosegados. Donde no era necesario la prisa para nada…todo en una dinámica... read more
on Mi TAPETE
on PALMEHUSET