Discoteca Flaming Star
A THOUSAND VERAS THOUSAND PRINCESSES THOUSAND CENTRALIAS (CRISTINA GÓMEZ BARRIO, EL ARROYO LOS CAGAOS, FRANÇOIS BOUÉ, INES SCHABER, MICHAEL MAHALCHICK, WOLFGANG MAYER)
Discoteca Flaming Star is an interdisciplinary group of artists who mainly collaborate to put on performances in which the action resembles that of a rock band or a group of people who get together to play songs and, through a variety of registers, live the moment. These performances can then be recreated in different ways and forms in the exhibition space, or refashioned according to the spatial and conceptual conditions of the location in question. They usually also involve various props, such as curtains, rugs and drawings.
With Cristina Gómez Barrio (Madrid, 1973) and Wolfgang Mayer (Kempten, Germany, 1967) as its founders (Berlin, 1998) and leading members, the group can either expand or shrink, becoming a type of meeting place that shifts and changes according to the way the performances develop. The group’s interventions have been described as “hardcore karaoke”. The songs, texts, sounds and images conceptualise memory and place, the present through the past and mediated by future expectations. They also react to the stimuli of historical, political and social events.
In the first individual exhibition of Discoteca Flaming Star in Spain, entitled a thousand veras thousand princesses thousand centralias, the group presents a new production, Centralia, and a re-presentation and re-working of a project conducted in Viandar de la Vera, Cáceres, in 2004; there are also other works presented under the umbrella names Banners and Alfombras. Centralia is an installation featuring photographs, moving images and sounds, all of which confront the spectator with issues related to the economy, landscape, natural disasters caused by humanity, and their impact on communities. Centralia is the name of a small town in Pennsylvania in the United States of America which has been suffering from a natural disaster for decades. After a fire at a rubbish dump on an old mine, a seam of coal also caught fire and spread to the various mines underneath the town, leading to the evacuation of the population and the virtual disappearance of the town. La Vera is the recreation of a performance, a joint concert by DFS and El Arroyo de los Cagaos, a short circuit between two groups with different cultural backgrounds but who use resources akin to the collective memory and the musical tradition itself. This piece is the principal nexus with the spatial and cultural environment hosting the exhibition: Móstoles, as a town that owes its expansion to the influx of migrants, mainly from Extremadura, as a historical nexus between rural and urban, between centre and periphery.