Events
Saturday 24th of February, from 3pm to 6pm
LATEX, UNICORN, LANGUAGES: FOR A DISHONEST RESEARCH
Conversation with Mercedes Azpilicueta, Elisabeth Lebovici (to be confirmed), Inga Lāce and Virginie Bobin
- Mercedes Azpilicueta, Untitled, 2018. Courtesy: Mercedes Azpilicueta
Argentinean artist Mercedes Azpilicueta presents herself as a "dishonest" researcher. During her residency at Villa Vassilieff as part of the Pernod Ricard Fellowship, she began writing a script for an upcoming performance, where she interlaces the work of the Franco-Argentinian artist Lea Lublin, the series of enigmatic tapestries The Lady and the Unicorn, the literary aesthetics of the Neobarroso Rioplatens, Chilean reggaeton, imaginary characters and vagrants of the underworld, as well as the theoreticians Suely Rolnik and Gloria Anzaldúa.
Mercedes Azpilicueta’s scenario was fueled by working sessions with the choreographer Pauline Simon, Jean-Baptiste Veyret-Logerias (performer and performance maker, and a practitioner of perceptive somatic-psychoeducation), the actress Emmanuelle Lafon, the
theoreticians Suely Rolnik and Gloria Anzaldúa.
Mercedes Azpilicueta’s scenario was fueled by working sessions with the choreographer Pauline Simon, Jean-Baptiste Veyret-Logerias (performer and performance maker, and a practitioner of perceptive somatic-psychoeducation), the actress Emmanuelle Lafon, the artist and designer Lucile Sauzet, the filmmaker Hélène Harder as well as public workshops. It testifies to a research process that joyfully jumps genres, disciplines and eras, is embodied in multiple voices and languages, solicits the senses as much as the thought and welcomes the joy of a collective construction, wobbly and voluntarily corrupted.
The discussion will take place in the spaces of the exhibition Akademia : Performing Life, on view until the 24th of March at the Villa Vassilieff, in which Mercedes Azpilicueta presents Pink popping plank (2018), an artwork that is both sculpture, set, script and score to be activated.
Conceived by curators Solvita Krese, Inga Lāce (Latvian Center for Contemporary Art) and Camille Chenais (Villa Vassilieff), the exhibition Akademia: Performing Life itself composes a polyphonic narrative around the artistic community founded by Raymond Duncan, focusing on a lesser known figure, that of the Latvian dancer and writer Aia Bertrand. Like the weaves created by its self-taught members, the exhibition intertwines the threads of myth, curatorial and artistic research, and the subjective interpretation of the stories produced by and around the Akademia.
In the presence of filmmaker Hélène Harder, and with the participation of Raymond Duncan sandals, latex tumors, a unicorn and a few poems.
Languages: English, French, Spanish, Latvian ...
Mercedes Azpilicueta is a visual and performance artist from Argentina based in The Netherlands. Drawing on a transdisciplinary approach within her artistic practice, she develops projects that explore the affective qualities of language and voice, the political dimension of female desire, and the connections between embodiment, glocalities and resistance. Her work opts for personal and particular methodologies such as mnemonic and literary techniques, public soundscapes in relation to social and cultural conditions and the use of performative elements for producing knowledge, allowing processes where contingency, association and playfulness take place.
Élisabeth Lebovici is a historian, art critic, activist and writer. She has been a journalist at Libération, writing in its cultural column from 1991 to 2006. She wrote Femmes Artistes/Artistes Femmes (Hazan, 2007) in collaboration with Catherine Gonnard and runs the blog le beau vice.
In 2017, she published Ce que le sida m’a fait (What AIDS has done to me, Paris, Les presses du réel), an intimate and political account of intersections between art and activism, seen through the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s and 1990s in France and the United States.
Inga Lāce is a curator at the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art (LCCA) and a curatorial fellow at de Appel arts centre, Amsterdam (2015-2016), where her examination of the intertwined relationships between nature and culture, and (art) institutions and ecology has led to the production of a symposium and a publication (forthcoming in 2017). She has recently curated the exhibitions Resilience. Secret Life of Plants, Animals and Other Species at Бükü (the Büro für kulturelle Übersetzungen) in Leipzig (2016), and Lost in the Archive, with Andra Silapetere, in Riga (2016), which took the LCCA’s archive of contemporary art as its starting point. She also curated the exhibition (Re)construction of Friendship (2014), which was held in the former KGB house in Riga. Lāce co-edited the book Revisiting Footnotes. Footprints of the Recent Past in the Post-Socialist Region with Ieva Astahovska (2015), and she was a curator,with Solvita Krese of the 7th and 8th editions of the contemporary art festival Survival Kit (2015- 2016).
+++
EXHIBITION
Akademia : Performing Life
At Villa Vassilieff
January 13 - March 24, 2018
With (-)auteur, Mercedes Azpilicueta (Pernod Ricard Fellow 2017), Ieva Balode, Yaïr Barelli, Aia Bertrand, Raymond Duncan, Ieva Epnere, Barbara Gaile, Daiga Grantina, Myriam Lefkowitz, Mai-Thu Perret, Andrejs Strokins
Curators: Solvita Krese & Inga Lāce (Latvian Center for Contemporary Art)
Associate programming curator: Camille Chenais
The exhibition “Akademia: Performing Life” will look at narratives and themes springing from Akademia, a community and an alternative school that offered courses in dance, art and crafts, hosted an art gallery and a publishing house and staged theatre and dance pieces between the 1910s and 1970s in Paris. Established by Raymond Duncan, American dancer and artist, and since the 1920s co- run by Aia Bertrand, a dancer, writer and an expatriate from Latvia, the Akademia was a manifestation of their ideological syncretism blending socialist principles, the desire to revive ancient Greece and a “natural” Latvian way of life. The exhibition aims to explore the ideas and principles embodied by Akademia at its inception as potential alternatives to traditional models of education, creation and community life, while also questioning its more obscure aspects.
More info here
Mercedes Azpilicueta
Pink popping plank, 2018
A sculpture, a set, a script, a score
Courtesy Mercedes Azpilicueta
Mercedes Azpilicueta presents here what she calls “scripts”: embroideries on plastic sheets where almost hieroglyphic drawings create an empirical and subjective mnemonic system. These works form a score and starting point for the development of her performative work. During the exhibition, she will hold several workshops during which she will reflect on a set of materials that inform a script in process. Using the body as a medium, this set of materials will be altered, translated, added to, extracted, remediated and questioned. This multidisciplinary practice, comprising embroidery, drawing, performance, dance and everyday life, echoes the vision of art developed at the Akademia, as a unique construction combining dance, music, poetry, crafts and visual arts in the same movement.
+++
PUBLIC WORKSHOPS
We Are Not The Number That We Thing We Are
At Cité Internationale des Arts / studio 8217 - 2e étage bâtiment A
February 2nd- February 3rd, 2018
More info to come.
“We are not the number we think we are” will offer a unique experience for 36 hours non-stop, involving hundreds of artists, researchers and thinkers from various geographical and disciplinary backgrounds. At the heart of the project: within working spaces, focusing on heterogeneous groups of people and collectives, gathered temporarily around pressing issues of our contemporary world. They will take over multiple spaces within the Cité internationale des arts in Paris, a meeting ground open to the dialogue between cultures where visitors will be invited to reflect on the present and map together pathways for the future. The common thread of this boundless programme is the fictional world of The Compass Rose (1982) a book of short stories by science fiction writer Ursula K. Le Guin.
More information here.
Share