Claudia Pagès
Barcelona, 1990. Lives between Barcelona and Amsterdam.
Notes for an Eye Fire exhibition views. Photo: Miquel Coll
Claudia Pagès’ mesmerizing new video installation revolves around global maritime routes, legal jargon, and the relentless flow of commerce and people that has characterized capitalism in action.
Filmed in a seamless 360-degree loop, the footage blends the rhythmic gestures of three performers and layers of handwritten texts into a series of music-video sequences.
The panoramic narrative is set around three distinctive and interconnected sites related to the past and present of Barcelona’s commercial port: the ship-shaped business hub of the World Trade Center, the 19th-century customs building, and the harbour breakwater. Completing the installation is a cardboard carpet printed with snippets of phrases derived from law manuals in which Pagès mixes up gerunds (a verb form that does not inflect gender or number) and considers bodies as both objects and actants. Gerundi Circular bears witness to the logistical intricacies of the city as a seemingly frictionless interface between the open space of the sea and manmade infrastructures, behaviours, and languages.
Performers: Esther Arribas, Stefan Govaart, Claudia Pagès.
Music Production: Pau Riutort.
Sound: Angel Studio.
Thanks to: Tallers Soteras, Font Packaging, Eager Led.
Co-produced by: Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona and ELAMOR.
Making of
Photos: Claudia Pagès, Latitudes and Hiuwai Chu
About Claudia Pagès
Claudia Pagès’s artistic practice spins a linguistic web of micro-narratives, queer poetry and rhythmic speech as she explores the possibilities of staging the voice through music and the presence of bodies. She is particularly interested in systems of distribution, circulation and consumption, whether by considering the commodities sold in Barcelona’s Eixample district in Rates i cuques (2020) or by looking at the second-hand trade at Els Encants, the city’s flea market, in Gleaners–Extracción (2018–2019). She often works by recording thoughts or noting snippets of conversation overheard on the street with her phone, shuffling back-and-forth between language and translation to arrive at a form of libretto where graphics and typography also play an important role. These harvested compositions transform into scenic displays where objects accompany chanted voices and movements by both Pagès herself and her collaborators. Arrela’t, nena, arrela’t (2019), for example, was a meandering spoken and textual navigation of Barcelona neighbourhoods being transformed through the distorting economics of capitalist logistics.
Claudia Pagès has a BA in Fine Arts from the Universitat de Barcelona (2013) and an MA in Fine Arts from the Sandberg Instituut, Amsterdam (2016). Her solo exhibitions and performances include Un rastro involuntario, La Casa Encendida, Madrid (2021); dis- des- duress. tris-tras, giro, fallo, àngels barcelona (2021), and Patio de luces, Yaby, Madrid (2020). She has taken part in several group exhibitions, including Lifting Belly, CentroCentro, Madrid (2020), and is currently a resident at the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten, Amsterdam (2020–2021). claudiapages.com
