Texts

Como los soles

Transmedial

Audiovisual installation performance
Performative cooking
Writing

Performance:
Dawoon Park
Lukas Esser
Zoe Spehr
Sarah Grünewald
Orlando Helfer Rabaça
Juan Pablo Gaviria Bedoya

Production:
abraso.org

2023

For 45 minutes a voice is amplified by sound artifacts attached to silent faces. The six bodies, in chorus, recite a text in Spanish about the digestion of sunlight, while performing gestures that, like the artifacts attached to their faces, amplify the meaning of the words. Around screens that project textual translations and light, two of these bodies repeatedly write the following phrases: "Movement affects, affections make you feel, feelings generate movement" and "Seeing the world move is not the same as moving to see the world move". These words accompany two other bodies, which passively watch monitors transmitting in real time the culinary process of cooking a patacón. This procedure is executed by the last two bodies, who during the 45 minutes prepare and fry green plantains in the company of an audience that listens to digestive reflections on the straight sun while orbiting like stars around the installation.

Como los soles is an installation and performative device that addresses the zenith experience of the sun as a trigger of meaning. The singularity of a tropical event understood from its thermal experience, configures the paradoxical understanding of time and space through the change expressed in body movements.

These movements, which can be substantial or minimal, structure the sensitive and significant experience of the world, counteracting notions imposed by hemispheric and hegemonic experiences that have colonized the understanding of the world around seasonal cycles. Digestion, as a physical and intellectual resource, is executed as an affective strategy of approach, propitiating the approximation of bodies through an invitation that builds collectivity as a methodology for the imagination of a change. This project thinks of the conversation between image, body and word as a paradoxical relationship, where the simultaneity of opposite senses portrays the thermo-kinetic understanding of the tropic as a possibility for the future.

From the historical periphery, the tropics have been placed at the center of world maps, propitiating a paradoxical condition that presents itself as a trigger for movement. This tension, activated by a historically disputed place, contributes to the imagination of time as a space of possibilities. The metaphor, a tool for the creation of meanings and relationships, suggests a particular interest in using the ambiguity of the word as a catalyst of spaces, which in contact with the image and the body, unveil tangible and intangible scenarios where the tropical paradox is embraced by the sun.

Photo documentation by Jens Tiemann.
Aula, Medienhaus UdK, Berlin