AGENT/ENCODING/FLOW
Prometeo Gallery, 01/29/2014 - 03/07/2014
ABOUT
Maria José Arjona’s performance research is aimed at exploring the potential of the body meant as a live entity capable of feeling, of acting and reacting. A body that becomes a powerful means of visual communication, an exchange of symbolic energy between the artist and the audience, and a conscious producer of meaning. It is a body that, through minimal, non-hierarchized gestures, investigates the concepts of space and time. A “universal” body, removed from its own personal experience and from any particular social or political context of belonging. For this reason, Arjona’s actions always maintain a composed metaphorical quality, differently from the practice of other artists coming from the Latin American continent who use the performance as a privileged instrument for expression, often re-enacting an even physical violence on their own bodies.
Agent/Encoding/Flow is a transcription of the Morse code into body language. The Morse code is a system of transcription of its own – the first adopted by today’s digital communication – consisting in a series of points, lines and intervals transmitted through intermittent electrical impulses that generate a sound which, once received, is re-translated by the receiver into language.
Agent/Encoding/Flow recuperates this “ancient” code system to translate the thirty articles that comprise the “Universal Declaration of Human Rights” (1948) into a visual text, interpreted simultaneously with the choreography of Marvel Benavides and its deconstruction by Maria José Arjona who, through antithetic but complimentary modes, translate the signs of the Morse alphabet into pure gesture and movement.
The “Universal Declaration of Human Rights” (1948) is an ethical code of fundamental historic importance: the first to universally ratify the rights that every human being is entitled to, destination point of a long philosophical debate that from classical times has reached our day and whose principles are now considered inalienable by most civilized nations but that are, still today, often infringed …
Agent/Encoding/Flow is a metaphoric tale of two stories, two bodies and two different presences, each endowed with a marked identity capable of sympathetically and physically interacting with the other, creating an estranging short circuit between choreography and performance gesture. The result is a cockeyed look that emerges from the characteristics of a double vision which, by crossing the scene, gives rise to an action comprised of reverberations, juxtapositions, interactions and contrasts where body language once again returns to being symbolic, a receptor of connectivity and “codification agent of a flow” that becomes social, political and cultural exchange.
For More Information
Maria José Arjona’s performance research is aimed at exploring the potential of the body meant as a live entity capable of feeling, of acting and reacting. A body that becomes a powerful means of visual communication, an exchange of symbolic energy between the artist and the audience, and a conscious producer of meaning. It is a body that, through minimal, non-hierarchized gestures, investigates the concepts of space and time. A “universal” body, removed from its own personal experience and from any particular social or political context of belonging. For this reason, Arjona’s actions always maintain a composed metaphorical quality, differently from the practice of other artists coming from the Latin American continent who use the performance as a privileged instrument for expression, often re-enacting an even physical violence on their own bodies.
Agent/Encoding/Flow is a transcription of the Morse code into body language. The Morse code is a system of transcription of its own – the first adopted by today’s digital communication – consisting in a series of points, lines and intervals transmitted through intermittent electrical impulses that generate a sound which, once received, is re-translated by the receiver into language.
Agent/Encoding/Flow recuperates this “ancient” code system to translate the thirty articles that comprise the “Universal Declaration of Human Rights” (1948) into a visual text, interpreted simultaneously with the choreography of Marvel Benavides and its deconstruction by Maria José Arjona who, through antithetic but complimentary modes, translate the signs of the Morse alphabet into pure gesture and movement.
The “Universal Declaration of Human Rights” (1948) is an ethical code of fundamental historic importance: the first to universally ratify the rights that every human being is entitled to, destination point of a long philosophical debate that from classical times has reached our day and whose principles are now considered inalienable by most civilized nations but that are, still today, often infringed …
Agent/Encoding/Flow is a metaphoric tale of two stories, two bodies and two different presences, each endowed with a marked identity capable of sympathetically and physically interacting with the other, creating an estranging short circuit between choreography and performance gesture. The result is a cockeyed look that emerges from the characteristics of a double vision which, by crossing the scene, gives rise to an action comprised of reverberations, juxtapositions, interactions and contrasts where body language once again returns to being symbolic, a receptor of connectivity and “codification agent of a flow” that becomes social, political and cultural exchange.
For More Information