Collectable

CHORAL, binding, horizontal. The Quality of the Common

The Collectables of the Year Thirty

Some projects and proposals are rooted in the collective energy, such as when Melanie Smith filled the Aztec Stadium in Mexico City with over three thousand students from Mexican schools, each carrying a large card with an image. Distributed in groups and instructed to raise their cards at a particular moment, this calculated choreography formed a large mosaic of iconic images from both the Mexican and universal nationalist imaginary.

In a similar spirit, Cinthia Marcelle and Tiago Mata Machado invited a group of people to walk together around an urban space in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, recording and geometrising their movements.

The Bosnian artist Danica Dakic filmed the tap dance troupe Bosanski Vidici, from the Glamoc region of Bosnia and Herzegovina, a group of immigrants living in Germany who came together to perform this traditional dance, in which the leader dictates the movements. Here, the performers are dressed in costumes from different historical periods instead of traditional attire.

And finally, Miralda, guided by the Latin American community of Spanish Harlem, filled the Museo del Barrio in New York with food offered to the Orisha deities, survivors of the African cultures that were transported to America as slaves. In this way, identity, migration, bonding and social activism become the subjects of art. Who takes care of the common? How do we invoke the whole over the parts or shed light on that which is choral, bonding and horizontal?