Co.De. 2022
Decolonial Constellations on Action-Art 2022
: s c h o m b o r e s – s e e d s of languages :
Collective body and poetic insurrection
Decolonial Constellations on Action Art #5
C O N s t e l l a t e
D E S c o l o n ! s e – OURSELVES
4 December > PLAZA de LA REPÚBLICA del PERÚ:
Salguero y Av. Figueroa Alcorta – 16:30hs
participating artists
* Gabriela Muollo (AR) * Guadalupe Neves (AR) * Carina Ferrari (AR) * Gastón Severina (AR) * Gustavo Solar (CL) * Gabriel Montero (AR) * Graciela Ovejero Postigo (AR/USA) * + + +
*the presences to the encounter and the encounter as a pivot that unveils and promotes the potentialities of the liberated action of-and-in its epic.
©gop / decembers since 2017
: s c h o m b o r e s – s e e d s of languages :
Collective body and poetic insurrection
ACTION AS WRITING happens and CONstitutes us. The word has an impact on the action, it reverberates, it affects, it incurs, it tears, it penetrates, it divides, it shocks, it moves and it generates consequences in the action, that which continues even in the apparent pause. In speaking the BODY stops, pivots the emission from the feet connected to the centre of the earth, we are sons and daughters of the earth, the word is immaterial sound that emerges, cosmic vibrational form, that affects from its state of senso-mental interiority, like the dew that was air from heights that was magma, the WORD-signs conglomerates of a mnemonic heritage of distilled human experiences. As sound or as form, it projects and transcends the distances between BODIES, flows, crosses, generates electromagnetic micro phenomena, which the BODY, a complex system of intelligent life, translates into perceptions, signals, emotions, some actions of co-Respondent intensity and more WORDS. The LISTENING is however a space that implodes and reverts that which was external in an intangible and at the same time deeply bodily experience, and double, the LISTENING is also echo, reverberation, therefore, much more encompassing. The BODY LISTENS INSESSANTLY, the-listening-is-infinite-word-born-and-mure-surge-and-fall.
The sound and its forms, the silences and their forms, the LISTENING is the shelter of the possible, s e c o m m b e r s : s e m i l l s , t h e orbital course of the drives. The voices of BODIES and substances affect EVENTS that are always ephemeral and millenary. The forms of issuance are also substantial in their consequences. We are becoming and being made of all these phenomena. Every insurrection arises from a poetics, every poetics necessarily has something of in-(inside, beginning of a movement, change) + (to emerge, to resurface, resurrection) + (to emerge, to resurface, resurrection). surgere (to emerge, resurgence, resurrection).
AFTER THREE YEARS OF LISTENING, we confirmed a place, a date and a time to WRITE IN BODYPRESENCE something of something of something:
Sunday 4th December : Plaza República del Perú, corner of Salguero and Av. Figueroa Alcorta, 4:30PM
meeting : confluence > appearance > localisation > finding > discovery > invention > conjunction > council > t i m e : s i t e
C O N s t e l a t i o n
It is an appointment with the insistence on ‘real-time’ on an artistic practice that INSISTS on confronting the physically ineffable. Again the prefix in- (“inward”, “in”) + sistĕre (“to take a stance, stand up, stand”).
This currently very colloquial concept that has arisen in relation to the now habitual – though very recent – circulation of the contents of our lives or of our testimonialities and fictions, through technological devices that generate virtual spaces and times, in which the BODY does not exist, is a mere para-science, a set of luminous ‘pixels’, “real-time” (? ), possibly “time” with another durational logic, + insistence on the approach of the ineffable, which also dwells in our BODIES and possibly only in them. Something that without BODY has voices, organs, that seems to resonate between orbits and nuclei, between the diverse forms of matter, echoes, PRESENCES. The performance invites to SITUATE in the mere flow of signifiers, it offers this instigation to culture.
This PRESENT EVENT is part of the series Co.De. / Decolonial Constellations on Action-Art which I started in 2017, a desire that was incubating and detonated in a timely manner during the visit of 6 German performance artists who were in residence in the space Peras de Olmo – ARS CONTINUAamong whom was Boris Niesloni, one of the co-founders of Black Market International / BMI *. It was a way to recognize the legacy of this format of performance/s in collective situation and to pay tribute to Boris’ presence for the first time in Buenos Aires. The exercise that Co.De. opens however is not a replication of Black Market in any sense, but a nod of unintended coincidences, inspiration and personal admiration for the work of BM/BMI and the power of the (significantly and unfortunately mostly male) artists who composed and compose it today.
Co.De. / Decolonial Constellations on Action-Art proposes the concept and image of the constellar as a constant action in sensitive relation with the diverse energetic and magnetic fields present in the space-time shared with other bodies and concomitant materialities, which is never separated from the cognitive, because it is pertinent and exists within the experience and ‘culture’ of the species of human bodies. Co.De. is a meeting in action of open simultaneous actions without score, of a variable group of performance artists in public space, where by sustaining the action for a time of approximately 1:30+ h, the ‘action’, as a phenomenon, acquires its own power and gives rise to processes, moments, images and situations that generate a bodily discursive experience that opens bonding intensities and becomes in a certain PLURAL BODY’. Precisely “plural body” that has been the central image-concept in the proposal of the CALL for the 2nd EDITION of the international festival Cine+Perfo, of which this face-to-face EVENT in public space constitutes the closing.
This format of collective performance acquires special resonance in the present times. It is a format that could remind us of collective ritual forms but in this case the forms are diverse, parallel, wandering, completely susceptible to the random although it demands great concentration, and in principle it does not propose a purpose, the collective from the concentratedly individual prevents prefiguring a result, and that ‘NOT KNOWING’ is its motor of intensity.
*Regarding the work and practice of the aforementioned Black Market International / BMI / BMthe European group of artists that has been active since 1985, in 2008 when I returned to Bangkok after a residency in SE Thailand with the WOMANIFESTO Collective, I had the good fortune and surprise of encountering their work live and direct in the context of coinciding with their participation in the celebrations of the 10th anniversary of the very important international performance festival ASIATOPIA, where I saw a presentation of the group and also works by many other artists of high caliber from the region and the West. The power of BMI’s collective performance was especially unforgettable for me. This experience reactivated memories of experiments we carried out in 1984/85 with the Crónica Group in Tucumán –(“Crónica del Aplastamiento” 1984, “Tragamonedas Reyna del Terror” 1985)–, of which I was a member, without any reference about BMI, and only rumors about “the performance” as a new format of work, that we as visual artists devoted to the experimental and ‘interdisciplinary’ at that time, approached from the beginning as a group, trying to recover the ‘body crushed’ by the dictatorship (1976-1983) from which we were just coming out in Argentina, and from which we were just coming out, and of the ‘intuitive body’ as an instrument of art-life and reconstruction.
In this CONVERSA about collective performance experiences with several artists from our continent, I also comment on those experiences with Grupo Crónica in Tucumán.
©Graciela Ovejero Postigo Nov.30. 2022
Peras de Olmo – ARS CONTINUA (thisisnotbuenosaires) Argentina
C O N V E R S A T I O N among U S
Current, Recent, Historical Experiences
Anderson Feliciano (BR) / Lab Abierto de Performance (CL) / Wagner Rossi Campos – PERPENDICULAR (BR+) / Co.De. (AR+) / Aidana Rico Chávez (VZ-AR) / Andrea Cárdenas y Javier Sobrino (AR) / Ada Suárez y Anabel Vanoni – Grupo Fosa (AR) / Graciela Ovejero Postigo – Grupo Crónica (AR)
Trailers from previous editions of Co.De.
Co.De. 2020 – Cometer h O r I z O n T e : políptico de los avatares
Co.De. 2019 – p o l i p t I c o : b a r r a n c e s
Co.De. 2018 – p o l í p t i c o : i n m i g r a n t e s
Co.De. 2017 – p o l í p t i c o v a t i c a n o
CONTINGENT conversations: RUTH VIGUERAS BRAVO, Two Looks, Three Records, MEXICO
book presentation by Ruth Vigueras Bravo
CONTINGENT conversation: MAYA RIVERA and GUSTAVO ÁLVAREZ, Performance o die, MEXICO
Maya Rivera y Gustavo Álvarez