To-ge(t)-ther(e)

My last posts brought about several inspiring reactions, among them two great suggestions.
The animation made several people think of William Kentridge, whose characteristic style is a mix of playfulness and profound reflection, exploring what it means to draw, to create a world, to translate, to travel...
In this video, though, he is less focused on the means of drawing itself, and concentrates on an attempt of putting things back together – or is it, trying to find what was it about them that made them/me this and not that?




The simple, classic time reversal and the retro music combined with the “choreography” make it seem like an old magician’s trick. Indeed, undertaking the attempt of constructing myself seems like an impossible task, one that requires, among others, defying the basic entropy of time. Putting it all together is nothing short of getting the papers to fly right in your hand, dancing in the air as if you had trained them all your life.




Another great discovery is Dibujando un espacio (Drawing a Space), a series of 3 videos by two artists working together, Teresa Solar Abbout and Carlos Fernández-Pello.







At first glance, this is a work about distance and communication, and I must admit that given my personal history, it took me a while to go beyond this reading.
But then, once we get past the metaphor of a long-distance relationship, new layers appear: after all, every relationship is, on some levels, a long-distance relationship. Trying to construct something together is a mad project. Words only get us that far, and the only way of building it together is trying to construct primitive (always primitive) structures that can handle the heterogeneous spaces we bring with us.
Suffice it to say that contemporary analytic philosophy started with the idea that some things are simple enough to constitute a solid basis for communication, and by now, analytic philosophers focus on discussing what they mean by "communication", "constitute", "solid", "basis" and "for".

Both works have a desperation I appreciate and fear. They seem at once hopeless and surprizingly effective. Also thanks to the formal discipline, they become clear pictures of a very unclear, impossible structure, entering right at the point where philosophy struggles.
They share a powerful combination of obsession and self-irony which is both scary and enchanting. Also in art.

Love, Art and Coimbra

Coimbra, a city in central Portugal, has one of the most beautiful - and creepy - love stories ever to be heard. It is the story of Pedro and Inês, a Portuguese heir to the throne and a Spanish aristocrat's maid. It has a tragic ending, much more gruesome than Romeo and Juliet (Pedro's own father, king Afonso IV, fears a political scandal and has Inês assissined), and contains what is one of the most extraordinary episodes in royal history: Pedro, besides declaring war on his father, declares he had wed his lover in secret shortly before her death, has her body exhumed and placed on a throne, and has the entire court kiss the dead girl's hand as a sign of loyalty to their sovereign.
Inês spent her last years in a Monastery in Coimbra, and the city is to this day associated with romance.
Now, what is particularly enjoyable in the story you are about to read, is that it happened in the same town, and yet, none of it ever meant to deal with the legend. It is but a simple story of two people. One of them happens to be the architect and artist Juan de la Mora.


"These hearts were painted by my girlfriend and I in Coimbra, Portugal a couple of years back. She is from Coimbra and I am from Chicago and we've been able to maintain a long distance relationship for the past 2.5 years. Since then, we continue to paint some of these hearts every time we are together in Coimbra. What is interesting about Portugal's Calçada (sidewalk), is that you can take a combination of a minimum of three stones and find the shape of an abstract heart form. The heart can grow by adding more stones to the original three."

Simpler than Blu

Firekites - AUTUMN STORY - chalk animation from Lucinda Schreiber and Yanni Kronenberg.
My favorite part is the chalk accumulating on the board. And the simple, obvious, yet powerful ending.
How different is this from Blu? Maybe not too different. I would call it a tribute. The style, the dynamics. Yet the addition of the canvas, the frame, turns it into a slightly different game, a play with pictures, and with types of spaces. I only wish this latter element were slightly more present in the film, and we got more often to travel outside of the canvas.

Guerrilla marketing

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Back to the Basics

Robert Rauschenberg, Erased de Kooning Drawing (1953)

It never stops being astonishing, the way the dynamics of a piece can outgrow the original input, the aesthetic conception, the initial conceptual framework.
I had heard a version where it was Rauschenberg asking De Koonig for a drawing that was dear to him. The story as told by Rauschenberg is so much more human, and impressive.

Dress-up

Two ideas for an eye-opening surrounding:
Chris&Ruby's Footies, socks for your chairs

and TRASH:Any Color You Like, a rapidly growing project by Adrian Kondratowicz, based the simple idea that trash bags are also sculptoric forms.



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Reality Show

(Working hard on a show with the Portuguese academic group CITAC...
Here's a teaser of the performance, called Reality Show:)

REALITY SHOW from Vvoi on Vimeo.