Closeness (NAT Art Residence - 06/2022)

Video Performance

Installation Project: Video Performance + Textile Object

"Closeness" speaks of the fabric of materials that constitute us and the lands that inhabit us. It explores a weave of textures, aromas, and sounds, of music and voices, of gestures and words that name our existence. It is, in turn, a return to the distant land of my ancestors and an encounter with a sum of memories that nest in the body, an almost ritual celebration of that which identifies us.

In the face of an experience that deeply moves me, I need to draw upon a multiplicity of resources to shape the artistic project I set out to create. Immersed in the geography of Cantabria, in the village of Tagle and then in the Valle de Liendo - my paternal place of origin and a land of childhood recollections when visiting with my family - I use the camera on my cell phone to record my body in motion. My own written and sung voice becomes a tool. I wander, immerse myself, and distance myself, contemplating the strength of that nature and the rootedness within me; I palpate it. I weave an object with threads and remnants I find along the way, needing to create a fabric, a red thread enters like veins, a sign of its visceral constitution. I make use of that object as a support for my actions: I play, dance, flow in that nature that is a part of me, and I rediscover it.

Fragments of the Basque popular song "Un Inglés vino a Bilbao" (Los Chimberos) and "Me peina el Viento los cabellos" (Horacio Guaraní) can be heard.

Acknowledgements: To Liana Strasberg and Andrea Juan for their generous contribution of some of the film and photographic records, to Purita for her stories, and to the anonymous voices that joined. To my father for his love for his land.

Video and Sound Editing: Maxi Sánchez Haruf.

Closeness

Worn metal cowbells

A belfry of deep and hushed sound

Dry voices, rough whispers

Brays and lowing

Always the cows, their scent of dung

and roses

Aromas

Flavors of seafood and mountain stew

Gathering flowers, apples, and pears

A cave in the mountains

Stable and stacks of dry grass,

laughter and tears

other songs

Red tiles amidst green hollows

of gentle rises and falls.

Behind, as you said, "the Massif of gray living rock."

Fierce sea

with compact and ferocious motion

Foaming breakers

Transparency in blues

Caress and tumult

Majestic rocky caprice

Something intangible returns in this air

envelopes me

rises from my feet

Small village of immense nature.

It brings you.

Your joy breathes in these lands

"They say you're leaving, leaving, and you never quite leave here."

(fragment from a Spanish folk song)

Click on the images for full view

Fanfarria (Fanfare) (Traces - 06/2021)

It narrates the sensitive experience of my childhood landscape.

The “monotone pampas plain” is suddenly in an uproar. Intervals of stillness intertwine with the festive and orchestral irruption that my ears celebrate and my eyes discover as projections of lines that are assembled and disassembled in the air.

I sing, play, somersaults in the sky, screeches, chorus cackles, melodies. A lone little bird explodes from its quivering crop in a sharp, sustained whistle. Low, restless flights (something they announce). Others like little dots in a flock gracefully pass, stop on the plowed land and jump onto the branches. Rattling swirls, stabbing sounds, up and down, everywhere. There Vanellus cross ... "Teru, teru, teru, take off your cap and put on your hat" I remember the croons of another time ... "ugly bug, ugly bug" seems to say the Flycatcher.

The joy in the body returns to my body. Singing.

With an installation format, the work is made up of a large-format drawing, a sound piece and this text of my authorship.

The drawing, made with mixed technique from listening to the sounds of birds and folk music. The sound piece, composed with the sounds of birds collected in a field in the province of Buenos Aires near Suipacha, the area of my origins.