Curator: Ximena Caminos
Friday, November 3, 6 PM – 11 PM
Free and open to the public
Faena Art Center Buenos Aires
Aimeé Painé 1169
Faena Buenos Aires, Argentina
Faena Art Center Buenos Aires is pleased to present Cuerpo Lunfardo, an evening of works-in-process and new experiments by Cecilia Bengolea, Jimena Croceri, and Amalia Pica, three Argentine artists working with gestures, rituals and, music and dance. These artists working in video and performance have been invited to occupy the space of the Sala Molinos at the Faena Art Center to explore new collaborations and experiment with the creation of new works over the course of one entire day.
“Artistic exchange and fostering of creativity have always been central to our vision. This exhibition exemplifies our mission by catalyzing experimentation within and across artistic disciplines while contribute to the launch of Art Basel Cities: Buenos Aires, where Argentinian art produced locally and internationally will be celebrated.”. – Alan Faena
Embodied knowledge is translated in our rituals, within each of our gestures, to communicate ideas and experiences and generate connection. These movements become our ‘corporeal slang’ and they communicate more immediately our lived experiences— each gesture an abbreviated narrative. The choice to work with three women in performance was a conscious one— a way to give space to the female body at a time when it more under fire than ever— at a time when we can no longer stand idly by while we witness the gross gender inequality that affects us all in every industry and every field. These three women, while not explicitly addressing issues of the gendered female body, utilize their bodies and the bodies of others to create new patterns and generate new language for the transmission of ideas and creation of dialogue.
“Presence, time, physicality and duration reoccur as organizing principles in all that we do. We are proud that Art Basel Cities has come to Buenos Aires and excited to participate and contribute as a space for the making of performances with a focus on artistic process and practices”, said Ximena Caminos, Chair and Artistic Director of FAENA ART.
Amalia Pica places her practices directly at the point or intersection where communication becomes hazy. She explicitly addresses the miscommunications and transfers of knowledge that may or may not take place through the use of visual and performing arts. For the Faena Art Center Buenos Aires, her work presents a close-up loop of hurrying ants that are counted and marked automatically, robotically— their work is anonymous, their bodies are numbered, and yet the score to which they move is dramatic and enigmatic. Consisting of two musical pieces composed by Rigo Quesada, the sounds are those of the traditional bandoneon along with cello and marimba that slowly disintegrate and detach from each other. The first part is the soundtrack of the video while the second is performed live by a trio consisting of Rigo, Martín Casado and Lucas Argomedo. As the trio continues to perform live, they loop with score of the soundtrack, making the music increasingly disjointed and removed from the digital bodies that are projected in the video.
Utilizing a similar format that consists of video and performance, Cecilia Bengolea proposes an interpolation of her dancing body via the re-mediation of her recorded presence. The video of her body is edited with footage that she shot this past month during a research trip to Jamaica, where she was collaborating with local dancers and choreographers in a mash up of Jamaican dancehall, soca, ballet and contemporary dance techniques. Live in the space, her work takes on yet another layer as El Traidor y Los Pibes, the famous cumbia villera band, play a series of their hits. This concert, party-like atmosphere, belies a deeper questioning of the changes and continuities between contemporary, popular and folkloric sound and movement practices across the Americas. Bengolea’s work reflects a profound conversation between European, African and Indigenous cultural influences in the Americas and the ways in which popular forms influence contemporary art and vice versa.
Jimena Croceri’s work probes soft spot between gesture, ritual and performance. Her work is subtle in its explorations of quotidian behavior that approximates the artistic process as well as the cultural processes that become almost mundane. Utlizing both man-made materials and naturally occurring elements like water and earth, Croceri creates a new language of gestures – small moments that explore the capacity for the human body to tell stories and create new forms of knowledge. Through her subtle actions she creates durational and hypnotic rituals that become new methods for drawing and sonic composition. She spills water on the floor and it becomes the parameter for a new kind of action drawing, while at the same time performers engage in a monotonous walk as they carry and break breaks which echo and create a new rhythm that fills the space.
Cuerpo Lunfardo is a one-night-only experiment, a space and time for new collaborations and works-in-process. The space is open for one day only—none of the artists were provided with time to rehearse in the space—and all that transpires is part of the process of creation as well as the “finished product.” The presence of the public allows these collaborative processes to take on new dimensions and expand our vocabulary for communication. Cuerpo Lunfardo is the slanging of the performers’ bodies and the communal, shared social body at one precise moment in one space for one night only.
Cecilia Bengolea
New commission by Store X the Vinyl Factory, 2018
Featuring special presentation by El Traidor y Los Pibes
Musicians: Ariel Salinas, Héctor Avalos (Perico), Sebastián Monzón (5puntos), Enrique Benitez (Punga), Enrique Vargas (Finito), and Antonio Veliz (Tuty).
Jimena Croceri
El color del río, 2017
Los sonidos estaban antes que las palabras, 2017
Queja para silla, 2017
Performances
Performers: Mara Caffarone, Federico Cantini, Florencia Carrizo, Jimena Croceri, Dana Ferrari, Miguel Garutti, Denise Groesman, Fara Korsunsky, Lucas Lagomarsino, Triana Leborans, Juan Gabriel Minio, Maximiliano Murad, Rita Pauls, Gianluca Zonzini.
Amalia Pica and Rafael Ortega
Music for 429 megaponera, 2017
Video loop, 2:17 minutes, synchronous and asynchronous audio tracks.
Musicians: Rigo Quesada (bandoneon), Martín Casado (marimba), and Lucas Argomedo (cello).
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Cecilia Bengolea (b. 1979, Buenos Aires) was trained as a jazz and urban dancer and studied Eugenio Barba’s ancestral dances, also known as anthropological dances. In 2008, she co-founded the Vlovajob Pru dance company with François Chaignaud. Bengolea’s choreography has been featured in the Gwangju Biennial in Seoul, Korea, Sadler’s Wells in London and The Kitchen in New York, ICA in London, among others. 2015, Bengolea produced the video RhythmAssPoetry, commissioned by the Biennale d’Art Contemporain de Lyon, in collaboration with British artist Jeremy Deller. Also along with Deller, Bengolea presented in Jamaica her second lm, Bombom’s Dream, a project commissioned by Hayward Gallery, London and the 32nd São Paulo Biennial.
Jimena Croceri (b.1981, Cutral Có, Argentina) multidisciplinary practice revolves around the use of the body and the way that it is able to mediate objects and space. Croceri allows her body to perform and interact with materials thus affecting how they are perceived. Croceri studied for her graduate degree in Visual Arts at the Instituto Universitario Nacional de Arte and took part during the 2013 Artists’ Program at the Universidad Torcuato Di Tella. She recently received the travel scholarship from the Oxenford collection with destination Amazonas. She currently lives and works in Buenos Aires.
Amalia Pica's (b. 1978 in Neuquén, Argentina) work explores the problem of communication by setting everyday objects alongside obsolete technologies such as shutter telegraphs, slide projectors, and 16 mm film. Aware that her ideas can never survive the process of realization entirely intact, Pica revels in their inevitable mutation and creates new systems of discourse that brim with fractured syntax, encrypted semantics, and gleeful semiotics. Pica has had solo exhibitions at Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. She has participated in the group exhibitions the Venice Biennale (2011, 2015), New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York (2012); Adventures of the Black Square, Whitechapel Art Gallery, London; Under the Same Sun: Art from Latin America Today, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (both 2015). She lives and works in London.