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THAT BLUE BUZZING SOUND

Workshops and public activities
Ese zumbido azul

Este río es este río, action by Pepe Espaliú, Urumea river, summer 1992. Arteleku. La barca, Marina Gonzalez Guerreiro, Tamuxe river, summer 2019. Author's photograph

Even if we wanted to, we cannot kill our dead. There are certain tasks that the dead summon us to do. And so, we carry them with us in our day to day lives, in small gestures or flashes of very intense emotion. How to share the losses, that which remains bound to us, the strange impermanence, that eagerness to bury our hearts, the confusing and incessant buzzing blue pain? Mourning is a political task, it builds community, it is a ritual of caring that reproduces life. Mourning unites us. I often talk to my friends about this, I believe that our grandmothers were the last ones to truly understand that death was part of life. They knew how to reconnect with the soil, and now perhaps it is time for us to create other rituals, other ways of being, of living and of dying.

Between January and June 2021, Marta Echaves carried out extensive research into mourning, its representations, politics and rituals. She was accompanied by the choreographer Esther Rodriguez Barbero, the artist Julia Montilla and the researcher Maria Rosón. From that series of meetings and conversations emerge certain questions and approaches which have shaped the programme of public activities That Blue Buzzing Sound.

Understanding research as a way of accompanying other projects that also address our contemporary relationship to death and grieving, That Blue Buzzing Sound focuses on sharing practices and poetics that make it possible to grasp experiences when language fails us and the end is centre-stage.

Marta Echaves. She is the coordinator of activities in Spain for the publishing house Caja Negra. She has written for artists' catalogues and publications and is, alongside María Ruido and Antonio Gomez Villar, the editor of Working Dead. Post-work scenarios (La virreina at the Centre of the Image). Interested in writing and historical research, her projects aim to revisit images and metaphors by focusing on intimate experiences and anecdotes as detonators of poetic memory devices. “La Contrarrevolución de los Caballos” was an investigation into heroin and HIV in the context of Spanish neoliberalism, which took on various formats and was shown in places such as Can Felipa, MACBA, MNCARS, ARCO... More recently, she presented her research into post-dictatorship paranormal memory with the conference "De las Acechanzas" (On the Hauntings) at the Domingo Festival.

Excavación
Excavación, Societat Doctor Alonso

El Desenterrador (The Excavator), workshop with Societat Doctor Alonso

November 12th from 6:00 PM to 9:00 PM

November 13th from 11:00 AM to 2:00 PM. 20 places available

 

El Desenterrador (The Excavator) focuses on words and their relationship with the body and action. The corpology of words is the power they have not only to create and designate the physical world, but also to generate an ethical world, a political system and a social order. Excavation is a pedagogical mechanism around words, language, dialogue and the ethical values that shape us, that allows us to "go below" the social uses of certain concepts in order to resonate collectively and deactivate prejudices and taboos. This workshop is a sort of collective ritual, with guided steps, that aims to unearth a particular word, so that together we can find the original "meaning" of the value we are to work on. It is in the shared process of researching the word’s deep and original meaning that, through this mechanism of regulated conversation, the "senses", contradictions and paradoxes of language and the word appear in their common and shared use.

On this occasion, we will unearth words associated with the concepts of grief and death, breaking the silence that usually surrounds them, circumventing the unspeakable aspects that characterise the experiences of loss, and diving deep into the magical thoughts that sometimes run across them.

El Desenterrador (The Excavator) has been developed up to now with the intensive collaboration of: Jordi Claramonte, Jaime Conde Salazar, Barbara Sánchez, Silvia Zayas, Lluc Baños, Tomàs Aragay and Sofía Asencio.

Societat Doctor Alonso directed by Tomàs Aragay (theatre director and playwright) and Sofía Asencio (dancer and choreographer), has constructed a language fundamentally based on the concept of displacement. This involves placing something outside its usual place, scope or space, so as to investigate how this change modifies language both in terms of grammar and an observer’s reading of it: displacement in order to reveal something.

LC Arar de Esther Rodríguez Barbero. Tristán Pérez Martín, La Caldera.
Invocaciones, by Esther Rodriguez Barbero. Picture: Trisan Perez Martin

La máquina de desconocer (The unknowing machine), with Esther Rodriguez Barbero

December 9th, 6:30 PM Free admission until capacity is reached.

 

Since early 2020, Esther Rodriguez Barbero and Marta Echaves have been developing what they call the "máquina de desconocer (the unknowing machine)", a practice of writing choreography to overcome thresholds and invoke what is there, though absent. What is this thing that is present even though we cannot see it? Can we relate to and receive vibrations from the absences that haunt us? How do we approach other perceptions of subtlety, that which goes beyond the hegemonic logic that delimits how we are supposed to look at and understand what happens between life and death? What was initially a research and creation technique, gradually became an intimate encounter and a kind of shared language: through movement and the relationship with space, emerged a kind of automatic writing that resonated with what the body moved as well as the location where the practice took place. The "unknowing machine" appears as a way of accompanying oneself in the face of personal loss and when dealing with the difficulties of naming certain experiences. It is also a machine that makes it possible to generate narratives in the face of socially imposed silences and encrypted legacies.

Throughout November, different events will be held at the CA2M space, with previously selected guests, and on December 9th this practice will be open to the general public to discuss the questions raised by this experience and to share concerns and feelings about absences and our relationship with death.

Esther Rodríguez Barbero. Choreographer, performer and architect. She researches through her artistic work. Her work moves between choreography, stage work, storytelling, performance and architecture, employing principles associated with these disciplines to design spatial and social practices. She trained in contemporary dance whilst simultaneously studying architecture and went on to do a UCLM Masters in Stage Work and Visual Culture and a Post-Masters in Advanced Studies in Performance and Stage Design in Brussels. Her research addresses the relationships between body, space, place from the perspective of dance and movement, with curiosity for the unknown as the driving force. Invocations is a practice that, together with the performance installation Do Bodies Dream With Electromagnetic Organs? is part of the creative process for her performance piece ALLÁ.

Julia Montilla
Picture: Julia Montilla

The Unmourned, a journey with Julia Montilla and collaborating collectives

December 11th, 12:30 PM

 

To be in limbo is to be nowhere. Historically, this was the fate of unborn children, those who had committed suicide and the executed, and their bodies were to be buried outside of the cemetery walls. We found mentions of limbo on one of the walls of the Móstoles Parish Cemetery and asked ourselves: nowadays, what bodies have been banished from the rituals of death and mourning? What happens to people who die imprisoned? Who among the dead is unmourned and which stigmas mean that they must be forgotten? Which lives matter?

Los no duelos (The Unmourned) is a meeting with collectives from Mostoles and social activists to create and inscribe obituaries on traditional and simple funeral ceramics used in the area; a meeting that will be followed by a collective tour through the city that is open to the public in order to put personalised vases dedicated to the dead in places marked by death. This route is proposed as a memorial and funeral procession for the lives whose mourning was denied due to the violence to which they were exposed and to our complicity.

Julia Montilla. Founder of the bookshop La Caníbal (The Female Cannibal), she has coordinated the experimental audio-visual platform Hamaca and been a member of the Board of Trustees of Hangar. She teaches in secondary schools and is a welcome mentor for the UOC's Art Bachelor Degree. She has been working as an artist since the mid-nineties.

 

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Activity type
Taller
Target audience
Anyone interested
Duration
Two days workshop
Dates
12 and 13 november
El Desenterrador (The Excavator), workshop with Societat Doctor Alonso
Event Date
-
-
La máquina de desconocer (The unknowing machine), with Esther Rodriguez Barbero
Event Date
-
The Unmourned, a journey with Julia Montilla and collaborating collectives
Event Date
-
Access
Enrolment free

12th November 18:00 - 21:00 13 November 11:00 - 14:00. Capacity: 20 PLAZAS

REGISTRATION FORM
More information and contact
912760221
actividades.ca2m@madrid.org