Interstital activities i Pa amb tomàquet
During my time in nunart I have mainly spent time to digest the process that led to the presentation of my latest piece “Latente”.
I have been questioning what does it mean to digest something that is not food and wondered whether that is something I could actively do. Or if it is something that is anyway happening to me.
I played with the words eating, digesting, absorbing nutrition, excretion and fertilizing and replaced them with moments and aspects of my artistic process: things i have read or watched, people and practices i worked with, the way they fed me, the material that got created, the way it left my body to maybe reverberate into another body.
The sensation of void and loss accompanied by a heartbreaking fulfillment that quickly vanishes, has produced a state of not knowing what to do now. I am quite sure that many performance artists experience this state after creating works.
To be here and take the time to allow these feelings to simply be is something I would call priviledge.
To be able to make art it’s also a priviledge.
The topic of priviledge brought me to invest into something I wanted to explore since a long time but that I never had the chance to do:
to arstistically work with the overwhelming love and gratitude i have for my grandmother, with the constant feeling of missing her and with a strange anticipated melancholia for the day she will be gone.
SHE and her chorporeal experience became the source of my daily practice here at nunart. I had many phone calls with her, I engaged with her whisteling practice and listened and danced to her favorite songs.
As during the creative process for Latente, I tried to go over the borders of my lived experience and extend my own perception through reverberating others’ chorporealities and empathize with other’s existences. I have done it with people i haven’t even met but always fascinated me, to try to feel what they feel.
This time is dedicated to my grandmother’s chorporeal existence, her life of endless labour and caregiving, her life under heavy patriarcal structures and her lack of freedom to even sing or dance… with the wish to give her a priviledge that she doesn’t have but that for some reasons i happen to have.
To create a multiverse history of her.
To rewrite an alternative past that is a kind of a future at the same time.
To invite her and let her move into my context, while I move into hers… through this small dance of the in-between.
In the room you will find some scores that you are free to engage with at your own pace. They are a proposal to get a glimpse of how I spent my days at nunArt. You can follow your own order.
At the end there will be some food of my childhood that she prepared everyday for me, which happens to be one of the most common tapas in the Catalan tradition. Which I also ate kind of everyday as part of my practice.
Lenght: 30-40 min (the space will be open for 30 min and I will perform some of the scores for max 10 minutes at the end).
Pa amb tomàquet is made by rubbing the tomato over the bread and adding olive oil and salt.
It originates as a tradition of the “poors” and it was made in order to rehydrate dried out bread, to fill the bread structures again with moist and vitality. One tomato could give life to several slices of bread.
Pa amb tomàquet (bread with tomato) is served and eaten everywhere in Barcelona as a everyday snack or tapas, and it happens to be that my grandmother prepared it exactly the same way everyday for me as a child. Bread and rubbed tomato.
