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Cuerpo y Ciudad is an urban intervention project that calls different artists which with their particular views and poetics will intervene the subway stations and public space of the city of Buenos Aires with a thematic axis : the body in the city. The goals of the actions are to think and perceive artistically the tension body-city; regain the sense, the richness and the identity of the public spaces; to vibrate, to talk, to dance, to occupy, to turn visible, to reflect about the body in the city as a territory of intersection that happens to the transit in life of a whole community; to try new forms of collective perception.

US:

ADRIANA BARENSTEIN, Curator and general direction.Stage manager, and choreographer. Winner of the prestigious Guggenheim Scholarship 2011 in the area of choreagrophy for the investigation of a project related to the concept “Cuerpo y Ciudad”. She presented in june of 2011 the play “La Tierra no se Mueve” in the Guggenheim Museum of Bilbao in the context of the l Festival Lekuz Leku of dance in public spaces. She created and directed the Department of Dance Theater of the UBA (University of Buenos Aires). She directed the Compañía de Danza Teatro of the UBA, the Escuela de Danza Teatro and the Talleres Abiertos. Her plays were presented in festivals and biennials in Poland (invited by the Tadeusz Kantor company), Holland, Italy, Spain, Switzerland, U.S.A.. . Currently, she acts as coreographer/curator/director/organizer in different artistic and cultural institutions as Experiencias en Escena of the Centro Cultural Borges, Programa SubteVive of Metrovías and others. She organizes projects in different cultural spaces in Buenos Aires, as the Centro Cultural de España en Buenos Aires (CCEBA), Espacio Itaú, Centro Cultural Recoleta, amongst others. Based in her background in Dance as well in Philosophy, she investigates the scenic fact, its crosses with other aesthetics and the link of theory and practice. She created and directs the Cuerpo y Ciudad Project – research of the artistic interventions on the public space – with the participation of specialists of different disciplines: philosophers, musicians, image and sound designers, actors, dancers, and plastic artists. The project delves with the relation of art with the public space and the capturing of new publics in the art/environment. It develops and puts in practice artistic and pedagogic projects in Argentina and abroad.

SERGIO PLETIKOSIC, Artistic Coordination. He received academic training in the faculty of medical sciences of the Universidad de Buenos Aires, also in the Escuela Nacional de Danzas de Buenos Aires, from which he graduates as Profesor Nacional de Expresión Corporal. He receives training in dance, music, theater, singing and plastic art with different teachers from Argentina and abroad. He works and researches with Adriana Barenstein in the dance area of the Centro Cultural Rojas de la Universidad de Buenos Aires. He works and do research in the elders department of the C.C.Rojas on the theater area. He works as a theater-dance teacher in the Centro Cultural Borges. He developes his carreer as performer of theater-dance - danza working in innumerable plays under the direction of Adriana Barenstein and other local directors. The plays in which he participates are presented in national and international theaters, with strong aknowledgement of the local and foreign press. In 2010 he acts as the artistic coordinator of the Proyecto Cuerpo y Ciudad. In 2011 he presents the play La Tierra no se Mueve, in the Guggenheim Museum of Bilbao.

JUAN PABLO AMATO, Collaboration. Composer, sound designer and new media artist. He studied music in the Centro de Estudios Avanzados de Música Contemporánea and composing in the Licenciatura de Composición con Medios Electroacústicos of the Universidad Nacional de Quilmes, where que also got the Diploma en Música y Tecnología. In the year 2005 he won a scholarship to participate in the Taller de Arte Interactivo de la Fundación Telefónica. In 2009 he won a grant for production given by the Centro Cultural de España en Buenos Aires through the program of his Medialab. He has worked with distinguished artists from the theater and dance, doing sound tracks, sound design and interactive development for different productions. His works have been presented in different artistic centers and festivals in Argentina as well as abroad: Guggenheim Bilbao, Artfutura, Itau Cultural, Centro Cultural Borges, Centro Cultural Rojas, Centro Cultural de España en Buenos Aires. L´Antic Teatre (Spain), TecnoEscena Formato 60-180 MADC (Costa Rica), Biennale dell´Immagine (Switzerland), Incuba, La noche de los Museos, among others. He lives and works in the city of Buenos Aires. . www.jpamato.com.ar

ABOUT CUERPO Y CIUDAD

Each intervention creates a space where it traces its personal poetry, with its possibilities and its limits. Each work “is” in relation to the background that contains them, an unresolved tension between each world in itself and the environment- all the works and the spaces in its simultaneous passing- and those works contained in this Rojas space and this Rojas space contained inside the city.

There are two concepts in tension: the one of the localization of the actions in one place and the one of drift, displacement and circulation: even the possible invasion amongst the artists themselves and with the public. The resonance that sometimes includes a territorial conflict. They can be dispersed fragments of a wholeness that only the spectator that transits them will be able to cover. And always with a partial look. The spectator chooses his path, each path generates different tensions.

We could think about maps. Each work / performance condenses energy, it regroups it, it disperses it, it multiplies it. They are trails, markings, imprints on that surface- space – building Rojas: its classrooms, its stairs, its corners. Places that are more hidden, more exposed or more unexpected. There is also the empty space between works. It is the space that contains all these works – in those two hours of duration – that finishes organizing the construction of the totality. The flow is given by the public that connects that diversity.

The sense of the work resides in what it links it to a route that goes beyond each one of the interventions taken separately. That interaction is visible to the public, sometimes is invisible to each one of the artists. It is relatively visible. As are the spaces, the rhythms, the urban routes.

Adriana Barenstein, Cuerpo y Ciudad Project.

Dancing on the platforms

Dancing on the platforms. The wonder of the instant. Minuscule movements that don’t wait to reach the edges, segments that move jerkily, lines or vibrations that cross themselves, tremble and disappear. Lines of disorientation in the minuscule positions of the five dancers.

Mixing colors. A whole conversation within the conversation. Like in the street, the hard and edgy fragments crossed by soft lines. Everything happens at the same time.

This happened before everything: the curious, shwred, mobile, gaze of the one that passes by, passenger, and stops. It breathes surprise. The faces that observe too much and abandon themselves to the presence without the wish to decipher with too much sharpness. Obliged to see with more simplicity until they feel for extremely brief instants the impression of being in a strange place, or better yet to stop understanding what happens or what doesn´t happen. The illusion of being swept away.

A whole game of territories, brief characters, pure speed relations. Neither more nor less.

The steps and the combinations that wrinkle the space, remake it. Sometimes movements, rhythms, subtle routes are enough to rebuild a place, inhabit it, invent new challenges. To fill it and discover that almost everything is possible, even to evoke it. (Adriana Barenstein, “Arte Subterráneo” published by Metrovías)

Movements, bodies, colors, noises that drag and advance in all directions, flee and fly between the things, not in the things. Lines that explode.

Anónimos

There was another “Anónimos” in the subway. It was the speed shaking the format. And also it was the format entering in that almost automatic dimension that is usually found in underground circulation.

Dissimilar bodies at different speeds and in different directions. Curious glances, defying, agressive, conspirational, pleasant …intertwining in the space with a cast of eight singers that embody in voice and body what happens to us, the “anonymous”.

Is there any chance that this intersection doesn´t become mutually enriched? Can “the public” with its different meanings be only a context, or either, automatically becomes an unavoidable part of the scenic text? In that case, which is the letter that prints in this intervention? It prints greater intensity. It prints almost subliminally the invasion of words of the musical repertory in the mouth of who passes and receives that impact. It prints another rhythm and a mix of rhythms directly linked to the heterogeneous. It prints exhaustion and shock. An exhaustion that is far different from the feeling that the theater hall produces.

Inevitable shock by being witness of an initial crossing between this type of propositions and some of those bodies. It prints expressive explosions on the cast. It prints questions about those explosions. In short…it prints…Body and City…The city, marks and the body…is riddled with marks. Footprints of yesteryear that jump and relate. And the voice, privileged object of that body account. “Ecos…a cerca de la intervención de un fragmento de Anónimos en el subte…” Jessica Pinkus Director of “Anónimos”. (lapinkus@hotmail.com)

“The video-clip city is the city that makes coexist in accelerated rhythm an efervescent montage of cultures of different times: it is not easy to understand how they articulate in those big cities the diverse ways of life, but even more the numerous urban imaginaries that they generate.

Not only do we make the physical experience of the city, not only do we live it up and feel in our bodies what it means to walk all that time or to travel standing up in the bus, or to be under the rain until we can find a taxi, but we also imagine while we travel, we build suppositions about what we see, about who we cross by, the zones of the city we don´t know and we have to go through to get to another destiny, all things considered, what happens to us with the others in the city. A big part of what happens to us is imaginary, because it doesn´t come up of a real interaction. Every interaction has a portion of imaginary, but even more in this evasive and brief interactions that propose a megalopolis…” (Néstor García Canclini, Imaginarios Urbanos)

“…Because the dessert or the sky, or the sea, or the ocean, the unlimited, plays above all the part of engulfing and tends to become horizon: the land is in this way surrounded (…) “founded” by this element that keeps it in motionless balance and makes a Form possible…” (Gilles Deleuze, Mil Mesetas)

“…I beg the reader to look for the concept of city to appreciate its generality, and remember, to know its complex charm, its innumerable aspects; the immobility of a building is the exception; the pleasure is to travel until you move it and to enjoy of all the combinations that its members provide when they vary: the column turns, the depths drift, galleries glide, a thousand visions escape the monument, a thousand chords..” (Paul Valéry, fragments of Escritos sobre Leonardo da Vinci)

“…each society has its subway, imposes to each individual itineraries in which he experiences singularly the sense of his relation with the others.” “The subway, as it brings us closer to the daily humanity, plays the role of a magnifying glass and invites us to measure a phenomenon that, without it, we would be at risk of ignoring…”. “The use of the subway certainly faces us with our history, and in more than one sense.” (Marc Augé, fragments of El Viajero Subterráneo)

“The man inhabits poetically” (M.Heidegger)

ABOUT THE PUBLIC

“…What is there are simply scenes of dissent, that can survive anywhere, at any moment. Dissent means an organization of the sensitive in which there no hidden reality beneath the appearances, nor an single regime of presentation and interpretation of the given that imposes to everyone its evidence. That`s why every situation have the possibility of being cracked in its inside, reconfigured under another regime of perception and signification.

To reconfigure the landscape of the perceptible and of the thinkable is to modify the territory of the possible and the distribution of the abilities and the disabilities. The dissent puts again into play, at the same time, the evidence of what is perceived, thinkable and feasible, and the division of those that are able to perceive, think and modify the coordinates of the common world.

On that consists a process of political subjectivation: in the action of abilities that are not accounted that come to hive off the unity of the given and the evidence of the visible to design a new topography of the possible. The collective intelligence of the emancipation is not the understanding of a global process of subjection. It is the collectivization of the invested abilities in those scenes of dissent. It is the laying of the ability of anybody, an attribute of the qualities of the men without qualities (Jaques Rancière, El espectador Emancipado)

COMMENTS OF THE PUBLIC

About La Tierra No Se Mueve:

What drew my attention is how a play can show us part of our lives or, things that happen to us daily. In my opinion, the play had two differents points. The first one is to take the reality, in which I felt reflected, is about the “time”, it showed la typical reality of all the persons in the world o perhaps, the majority, “we all go fast” and actually, in this life nobody is hurrying us up. Furthermore, this play made me wonder “What is actually time?”. Regarding the geographical space, I loved how it was possible to play with the different places of the world, the fact of going to and fro, to find oneself in an instant inside and outside the world, and also the way of encounters and disencounters between Zulema and Carrizo; that in my opinion was relatively incredible, to relate “time with space”, since in one moment Zulema and Carrizo, ran diagonally and didn´t meet. I also liked a lot the appearance of Hector, that showed himself as a third person outside Zulema and Carrizo, the way he expressed and saw the world (another reality). The staging of the bicycles, make me think that they were like Zulema y Carrizo that at times met and on another didn´t, it was wonderful. When they sit to look at the bicycles, it seemed to me that they were a reflection of Zulema and Carrizo. (Agustina Conti, Facebook)

About La Tierra No se Mueve:

I´m going to be objective with my opinion. I don´t like the plays that leave me thinking after I go out the theatre, I´m that kind of a person that goes to see a play that begins when the curtain opens and finishes when everyone stands up and claps their hands. I like to be told a story towards which I feel indifferent period. But LTNSM raised another kind of sensations it left me thounsands of rhetorical questions inside. A point to highlight, apart from the brilliant representation of that “time” and that “place”, were Héctor´s glasses that caused a turning point in the structured play that I was seeing. It makes you imagine that third character as someone from the future that blurs even more that context of time and space. What is wonderful about the play doesn´t occur inside the theater, but once I started to think about the true meaning of “world” with everything it covers. I loved it, congratulations to the four of you. Brilliant. (Isaías Blajotta, Facebook)

About La Tierra No se Mueve:

What is time? Or better yet, how relative is time? Is it really as important as we consider it or the only thing we do during our lives is to label it as something indispensable and that vanishes fast? How superior are we to the world? Is there a god over us that marks our destiny or it is us who define it through our actions and relations? Those are only some of the issues that appeared to me after the play. In my view it is related in a very interesting way to something that is present in our daily life like CHANCE, through the dice. It is a way to express that our destiny is as changeable as a pair of dice inside a glass it only depends on the way we move and act so these will decide it. Each person is a world in itself and that in that little world of each one each one can be in the part of the world that he likes the best and is not necessary that the other understands this little world, that is why in my opinion each spectator can give a different meaning to the appearance of the cyclists. To me, they simply represent the frivolity with which people circulate through the world, as if it only were a place to pass through, when actually it would be wonderful that the others remember our passing by through this place. I loved it!!! (Sofía Conti, Facebook)

About La Tierra No se Mueve:

Definitely, the play is different than anything we´ve seen before. In my opinion, what is great is that each one can give it (as it happened) different meanings, it can communicate different things to each one. La Tierra no se Mueve took me to a world that was placed on the line between reality and unreality, that make us wonder: what is real? What is unreal? Although you knew when it was the earth, which was the world, Zulema sometimes went through that world, wanted to break the boundaries, go out of the conventional. I also think it reflects the different points of view. I mean, in the presence of any situation each one has different ways of thinking, points of view. Each time the map changed, they changed too, so, the play kind of reflects different ways. On the other hand, I think that it talks about the changes, that nothing is so black or so white. I mean, the earth doesn´t move, is the title. Yes, I think, I saw that the earth moves, I saw that they move on the earth, I mean, I saw that everything isn´t like that and has to remain like that, that it can go changing. Finally, I want to say, that what I liked and what interested me of this play is that it is not a play that poses something and that´s all. This play leaves you thinking, you get out of the play and ask yourself a thousand questions, you find thounsands of meanings, you see it in different ways once and again. And even so, one cannot say the play says this or that, but for each one says something, tells us something. It communicates us something. It seemed to me really fascinating. Greetings! (Brendita Ainchil, Facebook)

About La Tierra No se Mueve:

It seems to me that everyone knows that the earth actually moves, the time, what doesn´t move, is the support, the ground. I also think that the name of this wonderful play is not ironic. The play talks about which things must move and which must stay still to give rise for something to happen. In my opinion, the images that were projected on the floor, were the axis to change the world´s “globalization”, but at the same time, that body continues anchored to the place, to the earth itself. I liked this play very much, and gave me a great opportunity of knowing this kind of theater, that I didn´t know. It also interested me the debate of the end of the play, since that allowed me to figure the play in different ways. Congratulations for this wonderful work, and thank you for the reception. Greetings! (Belén Salvo, Facebook)

About La Tierra No se Mueve:

We attend to an unstructured representation, creative, original, with a deep message that makes you think beyond the performance. We all have the need of looking for a place in the world and a cultural identification. We will be ourselves if we connect with our land and our traditions (cultural expressions). I liked it because we had an opportunity to see another kind of theater to which we are not accustomed to. Good performances. Something else I want to highlight it is the final debate, since hearing the different perspectives that each one interpreted from the play gave me new views. (Pilar Maturo, Facebook)

About La Tierra No Se Mueve:

The name of the play is not an irony although everybody knows that the earth indeed moves. The play talks about which things must move and which must stay still in each moment to allow something to happen. I believe that the satellite maps on the floor changed the perception of the world in its globality but the body remains anchored to the place, the earth in its totality continues being unfathomable. I liked it very much, congratulations to everybody who participated to make it possible! Cheers! (Cami Cieri, Facebook)

About La Tierra No Se Mueve:

The way to see things from different perspectives. How Zulema-Carrizo-Carrizo-Zulema could recreate spaces, times, gestures, movements and images. As well as to turn in an enviroment, which allows to see other realities…free without time.

About Cuerpo y Ciudad:

On Saturday July 10th 2010 I went to the Borges to see the Project entitled “Cuerpo y Ciudad”. It had already drawn my attention what appeared like the name of Espacios Intervenidos (Intervened Spaces): lobby, stairs, cultural room, etc. I related it to my profession, with the so call “advances of the biotecnoscience” that nowadays intervene in situations of life, sex and even of “intervened” death ( the concept refers to the “medicalization of death”).

But, if this is art, I told to myself. Then, what will it be? To sum it turned out to be a show that invited me to go out of the conventional experience of representation.

¿The stage? You are in the stage from the beginning, from the very purchase of the ticket. Right there, waiting to get in, somebody who seemed to be a member of the audience that was waiting for the beginning of the show and who turned out to be one of the artists, suddenly started talking and asking a question that dramatically and loudly expressed, left me thinking. The question was something like “¿What is it that makes a body to keep the cohesion of its parts?”.

I also was a provocation to my senses, when I was waiting to enter a dark room where you could see the composition of one of the artists that was performing a postmodern dance, I noticed that a young girl was talking by mobile to her supposed boyfriend and was answered from a little more than a meter by another young boy from his own mobile and without looking at each other. ¿What did this dialogue represented? ¿Was it real or was it fiction?

In that way, gradually, I was being introduced in that plot of usual-unusual situations, where it wasn´t really clear which was the audience and which was the performer. I think that the game set out by the choreographer caused subtle and contradictory thoughts, at least to me.

On the other hand, who were the others that surrounded me?, Were they spectators like me? Or were they spectator-performers that I discovered swarmed around in unusual situations? And what about those other spectators who without having decided to participate of the proposal chance had put them in our way, like an “artistic” tour? What would they think about those open and dramatically possible scenes? A man on the floor, a transgressor young girl in the intervened hall as a wide stage, girls (actresses-dancers) going up the escalator and going down after the main staircase (intervened), in turn another unusual stage.

Another “intervention” only had as scenographic objects a metronome and a fan, with four artists acting plastically, while the metronome was marking the irreversible passing of the time and the fan was also insinuating an erotic space.

During the “tour” we faced another intervened stage: a cellist that with his music made emerge an artist of mime-dance with her sensitive movements excited us with the feeling that she was removing her head, like a direct allusion to the enigmatic question raised by the artist at the beginning, because someone who removes his head seems unable to keep the cohesion of the body!

¿What else can I say? The show had begun without my noticing and also its end required a construction from my thoughts. Has it finished? ¿Does this show lead us to a reflection of whether the limits of the current era remain “intervened”?

Congratulations for the artistic-conceptual challenge to Adriana Barenstein (Alicia Losoviz – losovizalicia@hotmail.com

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