Idiorrhythmias A programme of performances, laboratory and language
Through choreography, dance and performance, the artists of this fourth edition of Idiorrhythmias analyse different protocols of repressed behaviour, at the same time as provoking relationships and reactions capable of arousing new forms of political subjectivity, as well as resistance. Idiorrhythmias presents the work of Antonia Baehr, Latifa Laâbissi, Evann Siebens, Idoia Zabaleta and Jaume Ferrete.
This edition of Idiorrhythmias, curated by Ruth Estévez and Pablo Martínez, includes some of the proposals that could not be shown last year, and which take on new meanings in the current context. The edition proposes going one step further, by asking: how can we learn from this experience and construct imaginative new bodies for the changes that are to come? Instead of proposing a head-on struggle against a possible enemy – according to the regressive policies that are flooding our current starved political territory – they are opting for a multiple, decentralised repertoire, even if that means pushing things to their limits and starting again. Interpretations that dissolve rigid forms by expanding and ridiculing the criteria established by the canons. It is not only bodies, but orality and gestures that are key. It matters who speaks, where they stand, and how they raise their voice. Gestures, as ephemeral expressions of being, are fundamental to the construction of difference, and have therefore been erased, in part, from history and bodies in the oppressive desire of those who impose the norms.
The fourth edition of Idiorrhythmias should have taken place in May 2020. In the production of that edition, when the pandemic was still a long way off, the proposals approached different forms of sexuality, and the way in which affective relations have been codified within each space and time in history. Beyond the realms of emotion and psychology, forms of affectivity have been largely determined by economic and social power structures. In a moment of marked empathic abstinence towards that which is diverse, Idiorrhythmias offered to set aside the comforts of narrative, in search of the “obtuse”, in terms of that proposed by Roland Barthes, as a surviving life where meanings could be free, on par with those which are marked or injured. However, last March the plague reached our shores and passed through our lives, endangering the most vulnerable, confining bodies at home, and increasing inequality in a world whose dynamic, more than creating it, is based on social injustice.
This time, our abuse of an overcrowded ecosystem that shows continuous signs of exhaustion, adopted the Trojan horse strategy. The various institutions applied the protocols they deemed necessary to prevent its expansion, perforated the deteriorated privacy of our bodies and limited some of our freedoms. They also interrogated us on the limits of desire (of movement, interrelation or action) in relation to the common good. For a moment, some thought the pandemic was impartial in its global invasive strategy, but nothing could have been further from the truth. Our global state of emergency has done nothing besides increasing inequality, highlighting the way in which different human groups are coded and labelled, exposing the most vulnerable bodies. In this context, necropolitics becomes visible in its most fleshy form: which are the bodies that are to live, and which are to die.
Antonia Baehr and Latifa Laâbissi turn into two large monkeys who, within the role of almost-animals-almost-people, allow themselves to be carried, muscularly and rationally, towards a free state. In their animal state, Baehr and Laâbissi break away from enforced rules, to inhabit the “cyborg world” presented by Dora Haraway as, “a world in which people are not afraid of their joint kinship with animals and machines, not afraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints.” Evann Siebens proposes a lexicon of gestures to work with, rooted in fragmentation, and introduce gestures and question positions as a way of challenging the framework of legitimation that often delimits the possibility of movement. Choreographer Idoia Zabaleta uses repetition as a form of distorted reflection that allows us to find other linguistic forms, without having to disregard language. Jaume Ferrete touches us with a synthesised voice.
Animal alphabets, disorientating mantras or gestural deviations. A sort of bewildered union joins together all these performers, a sort of “revolutionary, mutual and all-encompassing love that dispenses with labels,” as the Chicano feminist and activist Chela Sandoval once suggested. Now in its fourth edition, Idiorrhythmias suggests that we continue with a vocabulary which helps to create modes of consciousness-coexistence and agency, and above all, that helps us to continue with this balancing act, allowing us to carry on living together.
Programme curated by Ruth Estévez, Amant Foundation New York Director and Sao Paulo Biennal Co-curator, and Pablo Martínez, MACBA’s Head of Programming.
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