ESPEJISMO DESPLAZADO

PERFORMATIVE AND DURATIONAL MODULAR PROPOSAL

As part of the Olga de Soto Constellation, organised by the Mercat de les Flors in Barcelona in February 2023, and under the title of Espejismo desplazado, Olga de Soto presents the first module of the performative and durational project Mirage Displacement at the Joan Miró Foundation. This time, this modular proposal enters in a dialogue with Joan Miró's works present within the permanent collection of the foundation, as well as with the spaces of this brutalist-style building designed by the architect Josep Lluís Serrat to host the universe of the Catalan artist.

Transcending the traditional boundaries of theatre by investing in museum-like spaces, this situated proposal expands the scenic object Mirage, a dance performance conceived to be moved from the theatre stage to the exhibition space, becoming, in this transposition movement, the situated modular performative proposal Mirage Displacement. The scenic object displaced in the museum is duplicated as the diffracted reflection of an image deviated through the layers of air in the atmosphere. Thus, with the notion of a mirage or a displaced image taking shape in the air, the choreographer explores the possibility of a double score, physical and mental, to give shape to a protean object made of visible physicalities and dynamics while relying on invisible images summoned in the mental space and where the body's memory plays a fundamental role.

Thus, the modular proposal Espejismo desplazado deploys a corporeal, dynamic and reflexive dialogue between choreographic and performative action and visual expression. It explores the de-hierarchisation of the relationship between bodies, matter, and visual artworks through a dialogue with Joan Miró's works, considering the interplay of space and attention. It explores the memory of gesture and movement through various action verbs, verbs of contact, and prehension that resonate with the traces of gestures used to create the paintings and artworks exhibited at the museum.

It observes how presence in gesture engages bodies in a dynamic of tension between present and past, in the multiplicity of times contained in each gesture, incorporated, retained, sedimented, and revisited. Throughout its extended span, Espejismo desplazado plunges us into a world of traces of "multiple pasts" that condense and superimpose themselves, forming a gestural corpus and a common vocabulary that slowly emerges. They combine in the moment while the performers gradually plunge into a state of suspended memory that materialises in resonance with the works in the exhibition, revealing a gestural corpus and a collective body memory forming along various interventions and situations.

Mirage Displacement spreads in two distinct autonomous times and modules, exploring two different temporalities. The first module, recreated for the Joan Miró Foundation, comprises a series of interventions, performances and actions of wandering and durational nature, aiming to enter into dialogue with the artworks exhibited while questioning the frameworks of the exhibition. Its elements spread out, ramify, and unfold, attentive to the various spaces of the building that host them and the works they contain. In this unfolding, the proposed choreographic and performative work confronts the temporality of the exhibition.

Espejismo desplazado is a constantly growing form that explores the accumulation and superimposition of bodies, materials and actions, recalling the multiple fractures of an event in perpetual evolution and whose structure and duration vary according to the places and contexts of presentation.

OLGA DE SOTO CONSTELLATION’S BOOKLET (IN EN)

concept and choreography Olga de Soto
in collaboration with
performance Albane Aubry, Edith Christoph, Sarah Deppe, María de Dueñas López, Olga de Soto and Talia De
artworks Olga de Soto
length 3 hours

production Niels Production, in collaboration with Mercat de les Flors and Fondation Joan Miró, Barcelona
coproduction of Mirage Charleroi danse – Centre Chorégraphique de la Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles, Pôle Sud – CDCN de Strasbourg, Le Vivat – Armentières, in collaboration with NEXT festival, ICI— Centre chorégraphique national Montpellier - Occitanie / Direction Christian Rizzo, in collaboration (for Mirage Displacement) with Centrale for Contemporary Art, Brussels
with the support of Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles, Service Général de la Création Artistique — Service de la danse and Wallonie Bruxelles-International

first presented on February 10 2023 at the Joan Miró Foundation, in Barcelona, in the frame of the museum’s permanent collection

Constellation Olga de Soto, Fondation Joan Miró, Barcelona
Permanent collection
© Mila Ercoli & Lisa Gunstone