Image: Nikki Agency, Les Bains Paris. Photo: Christina Abdeeva.
Claudia Pagès performance art piece, a new work specifically created for the CA2M Museum also featuring Nora Haddad and nara is neus, could be defined as a concert: based on a clearly technical design – light, drums and text – it presents a reading of the story that collapses different periods into the present during the course of this performative event.
In recent years, the artist’s texts, sculptures and drawings have consisted of forms of temporal reparations linked to a queer chronopolitics. In the face of the productive time of neo-liberal capitalism and reproductive biological time, and opposed to a sole traditional, teleological and historical time, chronopolitics proposes other relationships between the body and time that allow us to give voice and substance to the forms of dissent that lead to differential forms of affection. These new temporal, transhistorical and queer formations materialise in this performance as possibilities for dealing with archives, extractions, inscriptions and historical violence through lighting, voice and sound.
Laser lights literally collapse time: their high-tech technology is a timeskip from medieval analogue technologies. The drawings they project are based on the signatures of medieval notaries, on the watermarks used between the 17th and 19th centuries in Catalonia as ways in which power was circulated. The lasers hold an archive of material to be projected onto the walls in the form of graffiti that moves in space and is impossible to pin down. Far from the green lasers of club culture, Claudia Pagès conceives animated wall paintings, a mobile archive made with light of failed signifiers of power that travel and are transhistorically fragmented. This way of revealing the past in the present, of invoking latent forms of violence from an earlier time that still give it shape, also announces new, polytemporal, polyvocal and vital futures that take place in the very experience of the performance as it happens.
While the walls of the exhibition spaces on the third floor of the museum will temporarily become a material publication, the choreographic text circulates throughout the spaces with somatic resonances in a duality that is at the same time denied. The performance takes place in two rooms connected by an exterior walkway where drums will negate this dual effect by means of a structural centrality. Orality will move between spaces, inscribing and reformulating meanings. The performance is then conceived as a space of discovery in a constantly interrupted time for the free circulation of listening bodies.
Credits: Drums: Nora Haddad. Lighting: Oscillates. Sound production: nara is neus. Live sound: Valo Sonoro. Accompaniment: Andrea Rodrigo. With support from: La Poderosa, La Caldera, Festival Sâlmon.
ABOUT CLAUDIA PAGÈS
Rabal (Barcelona, 1990). Visual artist, performance artist and writer. Lives and works in Barcelona. In her recent work Pagès has focused on the logistics system and its link with jurisdictional language, both operating in the verb tense of a non-finite and violent gerund that has direct effects on bodies. The artistic research undertaken by Pagès deals with circulation and maintenance, and their role in sustaining the status quo. The continuity of certain systems and institutions is maintained through what Pagès calls the “immobility of stable circulations” and the “architectures of containment” that sustain power through specific flows of goods, capital and value within a suspended and capturing present. Her most recent research has been shifting towards the search for its most primary signifiers, brands. Claudia Pagès has read, performed and exhibited at Fundació Joan Miró (2023), Tabakalera (Donostia, 2022), Vleeshal (Middelburg, 2022), The Ryder (Madrid, 2022), MACBA (Barcelona, 2021), Kunstverein Braunschweig (2021), La Casa Encendida (Madrid, 2021), CAPC (Bordeaux, 2022), HAU2 (Berlin, 2019) and Sharjah Art Foundation (Sharjah, UAE, 2018), among others. She had a book published by Onomatopee (2020) and is preparing a new book with Wendy’s Subway (2023).