Artistic residencies: SONORA

Action Sounding

Action Sounding is an immersive sound art performance that reimagines the mediums of action painting through sound, movement, and materiality, drawing inspiration from the works of Modest Cuixart from 1956 to 1964.

During these years, Cuixart explores by amalgamating unusual materials, often using wood as a support material, investigating the expressive capabilities of matter through the body in action, expanding the perspectives initiated by abstract expressionism into new inquiries. He achieves unusual textures through incisions, burning, and gluing various materials and objects to the support. Examples include Gran Barroco (1959), where the use of metallic iridescence (gold, silver, copper) with pronounced textures can be observed, and his particular use of dripping as seen in Sarga (1961), among many others.

Let us consider Cuixart's material explorations, focusing mainly on collage, layering, engraving, cremation, and dripping as gestures and strategies for creating movement and sound. Thus, we imagine the body as a brush and paint, a dynamic tool interacting with space, the canvas, and materials, such as sand. Each movement generates strokes that accumulate, becoming the visual composition of the scene.

However, we expand the sound quality of these bodily explorations through sound manipulations and with the voice, making the soundscape created through action.

We understand sound as a malleable substance, which we manipulate live during the performance, reflecting the textures and rhythms of Cuixart's works. By using the sound system, we choreograph the trajectory of sound, allowing the audience to experience movement audibly.

We have drawn inspiration from the manipulation techniques that Cuixart used on the support and materials as sound sources: combustion, incision, scratching, as well as dripping – pouring or splattering paint onto the canvas.

Thus, the audience is immersed in a multisensory experience of the work, offering new perspectives on the expressive potential of action painting and its ability to transcend formal limits. Blurring the boundaries between painting, sculpture, sound, and movement, the audience experiences the vibrant qualities of creation and reflects on the interconnection of disciplines and the transformative power of matter.

Discovering the figure

In Discovering the Figure, we revisit the work from the period between the mid to late sixties and the eighties, where the painter focuses on the theme of the figure, maintaining an expressionist distortion of reality while incorporating a new hedonistic and baroque aspect.

Les obres apel·len al subconscient, fantasmes i obsessions a través dels símbols tant característics de l’època daualsetiana com surrealista. S’observen rostres i cossos distorsionats amb desproporcions inversemblants que, malgrat la seva monstruositat, remeten a una estranya bellesa i estètica. En moltes hi trobem dones, grotesques, voluptuoses i espectrals, amb pomposos tocats, elements que semblen dansar entre el patetisme i el kitsch.

We highlight the chromatic stridency that seems to contrast with the sinister and dark background of the bodies and faces.

With a feminist perspective, we review these works featuring women, such as Bruixa de Barbastro (1976), Joc de Dames (1979), (insert), (insert). In the performance, we position the female body as an actor and agent, orchestrating the composition and subverting the power dynamics between painter and muse. We overturn the use of distortion, allowing the body to express its own distortions instead of external impositions, interrupting the traditional relationship between painter and muse. The dismemberment that sometimes risks objectification is claimed by the empowerment of the muse rather than the domination of the artist.

Seeing these works, it is hard not to wonder what Cuixart thought of these women.

Let's exchange the question, speculating and bringing the figure into action, we ask what must they have thought?

Maintaining the satirical and sinister components so characteristic of Cuixart, we invite the audience to partake in a meal, a feast, where the most baroque and self-indulgent gaze and enjoyment are highlighted to question who is watching and who is being watched, the power dynamics of the spectacle of art.

In the context of the Flors i violes festival, we consider the concept of women as flowers, often interpreted as fragile, romanticised, and idealised objects, subverting this by incorporating notions of strength and resilience: where there are flowers, there is life; where there is femininity, there is strength; where the male gaze has been present, these concepts have been ignored. This performance offers new perspectives to nourish and reactivate the body of the muse and the gaze of Cuixart.

884

884 is a performance that explores the possible connections between object, movement, text, sound, and other materials, giving rise to resonances and other accidents where the boundaries between the human and the objectual become blurred.

Reflecting on Cuixart's explorations and innovations, Feli's work stimulates and contributes to the revelation and questioning of assumptions regarding form, format, and gender.

Feli Navarro is a multidisciplinary artist who works with performance, sound, and listening practices. Their work seeks resonances and connections between theory and practice, exploring small actions that stir the way we relate to our surroundings.

Broad Vista

The multimedia performance Broad Vista explores the transformation at the boundaries of the natural and the artificial, the familiar and the unusual, the human and the monstrous, and resonates with the dark interpretation of the figure and the transfiguration of painting into sculpture through the breaking of Cuixart's dimensionality.

In this performance, sound and objects of exclusion are reconfigured as extensions of the body, reflecting the remodelling of materiality that traverses the informalist and delirious periods of Cuixart's work, opening space for connections and turning limits into places of encounter, imagination, and new horizons.

Through hybrid practices of performance, world creation, and visual media, zoe explores the multiplicity and fragility of the human body. Her work embraces the interconnections with other beings, both organic and synthetic, to question dominant narratives about individuality and to imagine alternative ways of existing and relating to one another.

Through sensation and speculative thinking, Zoe investigates how boundaries can be dissolved, fostering new perspectives on connection, coexistence, and transformation.