MURMURS IX: ASIA, Heavy-Metal

In Heavy-Metal, experimental violinist ASIA invites us to revisit a practically forgotten episode of key importance to understanding the connection between artistic and political avant-gardes in Catalonia.

In October 1973, towards the end of the Francoist dictatorship and in a context of increasing social conflict, musician Carles Santos and film-maker Pere Portabella were among the 113 people arrested for taking part in a clandestine meeting of the Assemblea de Catalunya. Like the other male detainees,they ended up in the former Model gaol in Barcelona, a prison with a cellular, panopticon architecture, built around a tower which, in Portabella’s words, “was at once a watch tower and a pulpit from which mass was said or moral lessons given”. During his imprisonment, Portabella encouraged his friend and colleague Carles Santos to play a Bach sonata on a battered, out-of-tune piano they had found abandoned. According to Portabella’s testimony, this clandestine action – witnessed only by a few inmates who were playing cards – created “a tide of noises, notes and sounds worthy of the concrete musical flows of John Cage and Lucy Lippard’s dematerialisation of the art object”. It was a challenge to prison and to dictatorship. A subversive action in a dehumanised setting.

Violinist Asia Jiménez Antón de Vez (better known simply as ASIA) re-imagines this legendary action, of which there is no documentary record. It is not a question of recreating a lost original, but of invoking once more its avant-garde, cathartic spirit in the same setting of the Model prison. As part of the Murmurs programme, commemorating the Year Thirty of MACBA, this performance by ASIA takes the form of a procession through the galleries of the prison, led by eight brass instruments, violin and percussion.

This action is part of Murmurs, a live arts programme running over twelve months to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the museum. The programme makes use of the poetry of the unfinished, undocumented or simply unmade to review key episodes in the recent past.

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artist

Asia

ASIA, from Barcelona, is an internationally renowned violinist. With a solid musical training at the Royal College of Music and the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London, she has performed at top venues all over the world, including La Fenice in Venice, Buckingham Palace, Wigmore Hall and St Martin in the Fields (London), the National Theatre in Shanghai and Düsseldorf cathedral.

In Paris she was fortunate enough to visit legendary violinist Ivry Gitlis many times, making a profound mark on her musical and artistic view.

Her unique experience, which includes a residency at the Cité des arts in Paris, as well as presenting interdisciplinary projects in Barcelona (MACBA, Estació de França), Paris (Art Basel Paris, Radio France, École de Beaux-Arts), London (Barbican, ICA London), Berlin (Heimathaffen Neukölln) and Lausanne (La Becque), has influenced her approach and her composing work, leading her to explore the convergence between classical and experimental electronic music.

She plays a 1740 Gennaro Gagliano, kindly loaned by a private benefactor.

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a co-production with

In collaboration with

MACBA Thirty

We celebrate Year Thirty of an infinite MACBA that projects the future as a space for revision and possibility: of taking up what was left unfinished, updating what needs it and projecting anew everything that can still be transformed.

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