We fly over the coast of Alicante accompanied by sacred music suitable for the exultant light of midday. The bird’s-eye view provides us with a large field of vision of orthogonal forms and perfect symmetries when leaving the sea and the wild landscape behind. From this aerial perspective, the rotundity of the lonely architecture refers us to an archaeological site of uncertain dating, with its bleachers, pillars, amphitheaters and pits. But it’s just a false […]
“A horrible and immense hole”, exclaimed a journalist from Le Figaro seeing the desolate aspect of the Louvre wall where weeks before had hung The Mona Lisa. After the robbery, the visits to the museum increased in such a way that the newspapers satirized about it: “some people like works of art by themselves, others by the place they occupy”, said a headline. The Italian carpenter who, one summer morning in 1911, removed La Gioconda […]
Hypocrisy, a street which both begins and ends in the world, and there is scarcely anyone who doesn’t have, if not a house, then at least rooms or temporary lodgings along the length of it. A suspicious old man and a trusting young one walk to this main street of the world to observe closely habits and customs of their peers. To cross certain thresholds to see The world from inside, as Quevedo did in […]
Seeing Carles Congost video creations, a cross of film and television genres for a moment confuse us, more if several of them come together in the same exhibition space, forcing us to rewire our cognitive habits, our audiovisual imaginary, after that initial flicker our senses are sharpened. The conceptual palimpsest is not far behind the formal experiment. Thus, in Simply the best (2016), a Swiss firefighter who loves his work as much as African-American music, speaks about negro spirituals […]
Je pense que le couple nègre/blanche est pire qu’une bombe, writes Dany Laferrière (Comment faire l’amour avec un nègre sans se fatiguer, 1985). Sexuality is, more than anything, a matter of ghosts, and the ghost that join a black man and a white woman is one of the most explosive that there is. Sexual imaginaries in relation to ethnic otherness continue to bear the burden of colonial legacy. The topics are renewed, adapting to the changing demands […]
In a state of nature, man is a wolf to man according to Hobbes, so it was necessary a behavior agreement. The social contract was born of the fear that we inspired each other. But living in society, the survival instinct is added to competitive anxieties and an aggressiveness inoculated by the system that makes the man a wolf with a tie, to men and to women. So, where are we going?, Gema Rupérez asks us in […]
Synergies between dance and fine arts are ancestral, prior to the segmentation between disciplines. In the 20th century, when this compartmentalization is called into question, when the limits between one and the other languages begin to be forced, pioneering dancers like Isadora Duncan and Loie Fuller take the stage. It is therefore not a matter of indifference that Rodin admired these two women and that by drawing again and again their fluid movements on the […]
Entertainment in its most advanced state is no longer supported by evasion but rather by the exploitation of extreme emotions. Bruce Bégout speculated about it in his novel Le Park, about an island transformed into a resort not suitable for mass tourism, in which visitors could satisfy their most perverse desires. Dungeons in casinos basements, dangerous jungles and neurobiological architecture contributed to fill their morbid thirst for spectacle. The nouveau riche who participate in the […]
