Everything is circular until is not is the title of Rosana Antolí‘s video, and at the same time it could summarize her vital philosophy, ergo, her artistic work. Dancing the hula hoop until it falls to the ground, trying to repeat again and again a few strokes on the paper knowing that they will never be the same, involve in that stroke the whole body transforming the canvas into a dance floor …
The lucidity that, as Camus said, Sisyphus glimpsed every time he reached the summit, an instant of triumph over the rock that precedes the descent, is what Antolí expresses as “seconds of resistance” before the inevitable fall, finding pleasure in the unproductive effort, in the “utopia of the moment”.
The body always takes the lead, Camus reflects, its destiny belongs to him. The rebellion lies in not collapsing before the logic of an illogical world, on the contrary, enjoy this absence of transcendence, clinging to the absurd as a bastion of freedom.
The choreographic actions of Antolí, by decontextualizing everyday gestures and integrating them into the artistic arena, sometimes remind us of the tragicomic walks that Bruce Nauman undertook among the four walls of his studio. But that Beckettian pose, the automatism that conforms us, the existential loop … doesn’t involve to Rosana a nihilistic approach.
Taken together, the multidisciplinary work of this artist seems to start from the same pulse, that of drawing, which expands through space and time, which is crossed by different rhythms, cyclical and linear, individual and on group, so that we move from the two-dimensional plane to sculptural and performatic, from galleristic to urban space, from the consensual to the instinctive movement, from the motorized mechanism to the eccentric arabesque (Chaos dancing cosmos).
The participatory component tends to dilute individual collapse in pursuit of a shared failure poetics, transforming space into score, objects in intuitive measuring devices of tempo, in a symbiotic relationship with bodies.
In her way of focusing on the basic gesture, in the reiteration of the unconscious movement, she has been inspired by minimal music, its cyclic rhythms with subtle variations, but also in scratching and other DJ techniques that alter linear time. And even in mathematical formulas, which in F=P.e/1 (her winning work by Generación 2017) are represented in space as constellations of bodies in suspension, in precarious balance, designed to interact with choreographic movements of performers. Pendular movements, syncopated rhythms, dance, pause, reproduction.
By reducing movement to the minimum expression, by stripping the acts of any intention, the most trivial gesture losses familiarity, which allows them to be examined almost as phonemes dissociated from language. From there she applies sociological studies to a particular neighborhood or social group (as in the database that she made of repetitive gestures according to profession, urban tribes, etc. in Virtual Choreography), or, she transforms the corporal inertia into an anarchic instrument, a protest tool (Agency without intention) or simply invites us to desynchronize from ourselves for a while.
A curious exercise was her proposal to visitors (UV Studios, Buenos Aires, 2016) to follow the instructions given by a computer on how to kiss. The participants put on headphones and their gestures expressed their obedience to the electronic voice. In Las sirenas escupen foxtrots de amor (suggestive title of this video-performance) converges her interest in isolating the gesture fragment (until denaturalize it) with her willingness to confront the impulsive with the machinic.
The passion of the kiss reduced to protocol act. Reduced to pantomimes, reached the zero point of language, we can reinvent ourselves. In this awareness of the everyday (that which mediates between the natural and the social) lies the revolutionary potential or, let’s be discreet, micro-revolutionary.
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Current and next exhibitions:
– Solo Show “Rock it”, Espai Tactel, Valencia, until 17/02/2017
– Generaciones 2017, La Casa Encendida, Madrid, until 16/04/2017
With “F=p.e/1″ (with a performance by Alejandría Cinque and Maria Durbá in the opening)
Curator: Ignacio Cabrero
– Feria ARCO, Madrid, 2017, with Espai Tactel, Opening Section
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