Performance

The Museo CA2M is collaborating in the fifth and latest edition of Domingo, the performing arts festival hosted by La Casa Encendida and curated by Fernando Gandasegui that over the last five years has brought together national and international artists to encourage experimental languages.

As in previous editions, Domingo 2025 revolves around listening to what is happening on the current scene, delving deeper into the main themes that the programme has explored over the years: the convergence and opening of different disciplines, generations and geographical regions; the protagonism of the voice and the performativity of sound; the power of the political and sensitive agency of images and imagination; the exercise of joyful criticism in art practice; the proposal of alternatives for encounter and transmission between audiences and artists; somato-political practices in southern Europe; and, above all, the promotion and dissemination of radically experimental languages to counteract the flattening effect of neoliberal trends.

Thursday 13 March SUI. Free admission on a first come, first served basis.

• 19:00 ORELLES VOLADORES Nilo Gallego
• 20:15 CLARALINDA, CLARALINDA, CLARALINDA Luísa Saraiva

ORELLES VOLADORES. Nilo Gallego 19:00h Approximate duration: 1 hour

In Orelles voladores, Nilo Gallego surrenders to his experience as a percussionist and sound recordist while inviting the audience to search for a new music theory and a new sense of tuning through simplicity and honesty. Because every sound that reaches our ears, bounced back and filtered through all the materials it encounters along the way, has a story to tell; a story which, over the years, we learn to ignore over and which this piece invites us to rediscover.

Orelles voladores is a percussion concert in which the artist encourages us to form a percussion orchestra with our eardrums, and use the act of listening as our drumsticks. The concert changes every time it is performed, adapting to each space and situation. For this occasion, the performance will also feature the percussionist Frankuu Carrascosa and An Amateur Choir, the open project based at the Museo CA2M that has been operating for eight years and of which Nilo himself is a member.

Nilo Gallego (Ponferrada, León) is a musician and artist who gives performances in which experimentation with sound is the starting point. His pieces always have a playful element and seek interaction with the immediate environment and the ordinary. He is a member of the experimental action collective Orquestina de pigmeos (with Chus Domínguez) and regularly works with creators like Silvia Zayas, Alex Reynolds and the company Societat Doctor Alonso. He plays drums, percussion and electronic devices, and in addition to musical creation he designs soundscapes for contemporary theatre and dance companies. He has presented his work at national and international live arts festivals. He also designs tools and runs educational workshops based on listening and sound creation.

Credits Creation and performance: Nilo Gallego. Collaborations: Frankuu Carrascosa and An Amateur Choir. Audiovisual coordination and accompaniment: Chus Domínguez. Writing support: Álex Reynolds.. Co-production: TNT (Terrassa Noves Tendencies) Festival; Residencies with the support of : Espai nyamnyam, El Consulado Fonteta, Espacio Los Barros, La Poderosa and L’Estruch.

CLARALINDA, CLARALINDA, CLARALINDA Luísa Saraiva 20:15h Approximate duration: 40 minutes

Claralinda, Claralinda, Claralinda is a choreographic songbook in which Luísa Saraiva shares her practice and extensive research on the physicality of singing, the limits of the female voice and the haptic nature of sound. Analysing different types of songs and instruments and travelling through excerpts from her works, she explores the sonic possibilities between breathing, sound and singing through a movement practice that visually presents the physical effort involved in controlling the breath. The songs are added, transformed and improvised according to the research and process in which Luísa is engaged at a given time. Her musical universe is inspired by traditional folk songs from central and northern Portugal.

Luisa Saravia is a choreographer who lives between Porto and Berlin. Her artistic practice investigates the language of the body and voice, situated at the intersection between movement and musical composition. Her work is deeply influenced by research on the physicality of the voice and a contemporary, non-essentialist perspective of folklore and tradition.  Luísa studied psychology at the University of Porto and dance at the Folkwang Arts University in Essen, Germany. She has worked with artists from different disciplines, such as Lea Letzel, Carlos Azeredo Mesquita and Senem Gökce Ogultekin. She has received grants for several art research programmes and in 2019 she was selected for the danceWEB programme and was a choreographer-in-residence at K3 | Tanzplan Hamburg. In 2022/2023 she received the Tanzpraxis grant from the city of Berlin. Since 2020 she has been an activist in the field of mental health in performing arts, promoting workshops and lectures.

Credits Choreography and performance: Luísa Saraiva. Instrument: Inês Tartaruga Água. Acknowledgements: João dos Santos Martins and Associação Parasita.

In association with: 

Cha-cha-cha at dawn at dawn cha-cha-cha

Cha-cha-cha the backside the backside cha-cha-cha

Cha cha beach hammock idler

Idler hammock beach cha cha

Cha cha apple orange pineapple

Pineapple orange apple cha-cha-cha

Cha-cha-cha square palm trees tra-la-la

Tra-la-la palm trees square cha-cha-cha

Cha-cha-cha boats barbed wire boom-boom-boom

Boom-boom-boom barbed wire boats cha-cha-cha

Cha-cha-cha on the phone on the phone cha-cha-cha

Cha-cha cha-cha word

Word cha-cha-cha

In little more than a decade, the body has moved from the sidelines to a become a focal point of contemporary culture. For this shift to fully unfold its potential, it is necessary to pay attention to the way our materiality articulates with our surroundings. Word cha-cha-cha explores turning points in which bodies are given shape by words, and vice versa, through the paradigm of expanded language. Ambivalently, this language of blurred boundaries both produces and is the result of movement, sound, images, automatisms, feelings, economy and modes of social organisation. This programme proposes a series of performances that bear partial witness to the complexity with which these elements intertwine and affect each other.

Language no longer belongs to humans alone but, in a return to the fable of sorts, animals, objects and natural elements murmur in our ears. On the other hand, the certainty of signifiers fades when confronted with the infinite variability of models and the multiplicity of possible interpretations. In this realm where vagueness reigns, every sentence we utter is a spell, a door we open without knowing where it leads. By questioning the mechanisms for naming and their relationship with things, there is also interference with established dynamics, and possibilities emerge that are beyond the imaginable.

Through choreographies, poems, songs, whispers, shouts, rumours, spells, films without images, the clacking of castanets, familiar languages, obscure languages, unusual translations, incarnated books and newspapers, the language of birds and computers, we may temporarily lose our speech and be forced to search for words. Who knows if we will find different ways of expressing thought to, facing, before, below, fitting, with, against, about, from, since, after, during, in, between, towards, until, for, by, according to, without, under, over, behind, versus, via the silhouette of clouds, the bottom of pockets or the dregs of coffee.

Curated by Quim Pujol

Early 19th-century London witnessed the founding of The Picnic Society, an association that would meet regularly in the open air, at which time each member was expected to provide some of the entertainment and refreshments without there being a specific host. Borrowing this concept from the Picnic Society, the CA2M Museum invites a number of curators each year to design a programme for the Museum’s roof terrace.

Every Thursday from the end of May until the end of June, our roof terrace is turned into a space for hosting a programme of activities that combine body and sound with education and participation. 

PROGRAMME

Thurs 25/05 I Llorenç Barber. ACTUM REENACTMENT. Javi Álvarez.

Thurs 01/06 I Juf (Leticia Ybarra + Bea Ortega Botas), Pol Jiménez, Matthieu Blond.

Thurs 08/06 I Park Keito (Kotomi Nishiwaki + Miquel Casaponsa), Joris Lacoste, Noela Covelo. 

Thurs 15/06 I Paula Miralles, Josep Xortó & The Congosound.

Thurs 22/06 I Alix Eynaudi, Clara Amaral, Simon Asencio.

Thurs 29/06 I María Jerez +Élan d’Orphium, Laura Llaneli, Venecia Flúor.

TIMES: 9–11PM, EXCEPT FOR THE SESSION ON 29/06 WHICH WILL START AT 8:30PM

DOORS OPEN AT: 8:30PM. PLEASE BE ON TIME.

SELF-PUBLISHING TABLES

Thurs 25/05 I CAJA NEGRA

Thurs 01/06 I CANICHE

Thurs 08/06 I LA UÑA ROTA

Thurs 15/06 I CONTINTA ME TIENES

Thurs 22/06 I LIBROS DE ARTISTAS

Thurs 29/06 I VARAMO PRESS

ABOUT THE CURATOR

Combining the performing arts and contemporary art, Quim Pujol’s artistic practice denatures language to reveal the ideology that lies behind ordinary modes of expression and to open up other possibilities of association. The latest pieces by this iconoclastic writer and performance artist are El mensaje de otros mundos (2021) and Variedad de variedades (2022). He has participated in exhibitions at arts centres such as the Fundació Antoni Tàpies, La Capella and the EACC. Together with Ixiar Rozas, he edited the book on affect theory Ejercicios de ocupación (Ediciones Polígrafa, 2015). He curated the experimental programme of the Mercat de les Flors (2011–2015) and collaborates with the Observatorio del Placer.

Acknowledgements: Berta Gutiérrez Casaos.

Obituary is a live monologue performed by the artist which falls apart and eats itself.

Combining characters and motifs from past work, the performance acts as a parody of Plato’s cave and an expansion of the language found in Matt Copson’s animation and installation work.

This is his first fully-fledged performance with live soundtrack by long-time collaborator felicita.

MATT COPSON

Matt Copson was born in 1992 in Oxford, England. His work uses theatrical devices and artistic tropes to create existential dramas of contemporaneity, abstraction, eternal recurrence and the uncanny.
His shown exhibitions and projects at CLEARING (Brussels) Swiss Institute (New York), Louis Vuitton Foundation (Paris), Mönchehaus Museum (Goslar) and Serpentine Sackler Gallery (London). In 2022, he will premiere ‘Last Days’, his first opera as a librettist and director, at the Royal Opera House, London.

“EXPOGRAPHY is the physical-mental-time space in which the fact of seeing and the fact of being seen converge: what we are and what we experience when looking, what we are and what we experience when we are looked at, and what vision is in itself, as something half way between the capacity of the viewer and what emanates from the viewed object. To be activated, any exhibition needs these three terms—the viewer, the viewed and the vision—which, to a certain extent, converge in one single space-time-event-experience.

On the other hand, EXPOGRAPHY is a reflection on the Museum and on Theatre: what happens in each one of these places; the codes governing time and the audience’s relationship with the work imposed by each individual space. We propose the game of altering these codes and experimenting with what is produced as a result. We propose forcing a certain perspective, situating ourselves in places which are physically and temporally different to the usual, and observing the effects these variations produce in us.

The EXPOGRAPHY project takes the form of two totally different works which are the result of the complete deployment of this whole research: COLLECTIVE EXPOGRAPHY and RETROSPECTIVE EXPOGRAPHY. The first work is presented on Saturday 12 January here at CA2M, playing with the temporality of the museum, which requires a commitment from spectators to remain in the museum for the 8 consecutive hours of the experience. In fact, in COLLECTIVE EXPOGRAPHY, people are actually participants and not spectators. Over the duration of this long event, the artistic proposal is mixed with the need to eat, to visit the toilet, to smoke a cigarette and to cohabit the space with others. All these needs are co-opted into the device, which also opens up to other needs and desires. Although apparently very demanding because of the commitment to remain relatively isolated for 8 hours, this experience in fact offers the freedom to leave behind the “prison” of our habits and ways of looking at the world for the duration of the event.

The second work, RETROSPECTIVE EXPOGRAPHY, is more of a “spectacle” or “show” in the conventional meaning of the word, and will be presented one week later, on 17,18 and 19 January at Teatros del Canal.

This research process has been supported and coproduced jointly by CA2M and Teatros del Canal.