Son[i]a #364
Maria José Arjona
![Son[i]a #364](https://img.macba.cat/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/performers_0.jpeg)
With a career spanning several decades of practice and exchanges under her belt, Maria José Arjona uses durational performance to explore a body suspended on the brink of the abyss in an affirmative way. Her repertoire of gestures is part of a large archive that is always moving and changing, often influenced by the history of performance, but always alive. An archive that is renewed with each action, each substance, each journey, each organism, each human or non-human being. In her work, duration—that is, the time of the performance—becomes the time of the artist’s body. And this time runs through everything. In the same way, life runs through matter, it overspills the boundaries of choreography and of any heterodox vision of reality, it overspills conventional ways of being in the art institution.
In her journeys and her early morning walks, things find her. Then, they sometimes become oracles, infinite translations of other things, signs of a time to come. And in her becoming-animal, to borrow from Deleuze, Arjona recognises herself in a pack of wolves, in the mutualism of crows, and in the migratory eagles that travel with her, north to south and south to north, finding her, again and again, in her projects. Often to protect her, sometimes as symbols with which to elude boundaries and fixed identities.
In this podcast, Maria José Arjona looks forward and back, mapping out an invisible chart of processes, actions, and desires, connecting her solo work and her need collapse the politics of time with other artists, by subverting institutional time: What happens to a performance and a performer if their work involves spending eight hours in a museum?
Deleted scenes
We dig up some unreleased fragments of our conversation with choreographer, performer and artist Itxaso Corral, which we couldn’t include the first time around. With Itxaso, we embrace the complexity of being-and-doing-with-others, and we look inside some of the notions that underlie her thinking-by-doing: hijacked words that can be set free, such as tenderness, naivety, empathy, modesty and cringe. We also open up a host of questions—poetic, political, and convivial—in order to spend some time with them, leaving them unanswered. How far do things go? Is reading a text just reading a text? Does a written text remain only on the page? Is there no vibration? Who is legitimized, and to say what? Which things are accepted as legitimized and which are left out? Do I seem to be alone? Where can we come together?
Mapa Teatro
Mapa Teatro is a laboratory of social imagination founded by Heidi, Elizabeth and Rolf Abderhalden in Paris in 1984. In 1986 it moved to Bogotá, where it operates today. Since its earliest days, Mapa Teatro has worked in the field of live arts, with a commitment to collective practices and the creation of temporary experimental communities. Like good cannibals, its members work on transforming materials to create new universes that embrace testimonies and fiction, poetics and politics. In this podcast, we chat to Mapa Teatro about 40 years of practice and extended fraternity. We talk about living archives, happenings, witnesses, and fiction.
Deleted scenes
We dig up some unreleased fragments of our conversation with the choreographer, performer and artist Maria José Arjona. We talk about travel as a catalyst for her work, about interaction with the spectator, about her repertoire of gestures, about connecting and listening to animality, and about contact with the other side.
Boris Charmatz
Dance interpreter, choreographer, thinker, writer, teacher and curator Boris Charmatz reflects on how to address power structures within the artistic field. He also talks about polisemy, collectivity, communities and anti-communities, radical pedagogy, dissent, the Musée de la danse, the complex and inexhaustible relationship between dance and history, working inside gestures, and the beauty of older people skateboarding.
André Lepecki
André Lepecki talks about the chronopolitics of disappearance, dance, Louis XIV, the acquisition of choreography, testimonial power, object-oriented ontologies, choreopolicing, the writing of movement, and selfies.