A performance inside a book inside a space inside a building // Esther Planas at PABD London ICA

See Me // Hear Me // Feel Me at PAMM /// Madrid 18 February 2012

                                                                                   

PAMM  presents:


SEE ME//  HEAR ME// FEEL ME
Ephemeral Disturbance Psycho-Perceptive 


PAMM (Performing Arts Mirror Madrid) is a non profit art space without fixed headquarters but located in Madrid, opened for creation, diffusion, development and spreading of performing arts, or projects of national or international performers, ready to work throughout guerrilla or resistance practices and under budget.

Mexican Embassy at La Residencia 134 London East End 15 January 2012

Los Detectives Salvajes : Arturo Belano y Ulises Lima

     

Mexican Embassy at La Residencia 134 London East End

Olmeco Gold Tablets 

From Walter Benjamin text Mexican Embassy:

"I never pass a wooden fetish,gilded Buddha, or Mexican idol with out telling my self : that maybe the true God " Charles Baudelaire 

" I dreamed I was a member of an exploring party in Mexico. After crossing a high, primeval jungle, we came upon a system of aboveground caves in the mountains where an order had survived from the time of the first missionaries till now, its monks continuing the work of conversion among the natives. In an immense central grotto with a Gothically pointed roof, Mass was celebrated according to the most ancient rites. we joined the ceremony and witnessed its climax: toward a wooden bust of God the Father fixed high on a wall of the cave a priest raised a Mexican fetish. At this, the divine head turned thrice in denial from right to left."

Walter Benjamin, "Mexican Embassy", from One-Way Street, in ReflectionsThe event Mexican Embassy tuck place Sunday 15 of January at Residencia 134 , Esther Planas studio flat in London , a place that has been also a "refuge" and short residence for various artist and friends for the past five years ... The idea was to have a few issues present and leave the spirit of the day take its time and lead the happening , as a guest, some had arrived early , they maybe had to cook or cut onions...some just talked to each other relaxed , but puzzled about what was supposed to happen.. this feeling of an imminent "thing about to occur " floated in the space making the non event a surreal paralel to Buñuel's The Exterminator Angel subject...

Some of the guest was too similar to Salvador Dali, the antagonist of Luis Buñuel , after he denounced Luis of been a "commi " to the authorities in New York forcing his ex-friend exile to Mexico and some how creating or starting the cause of what later would be some of the best creations that Buñuel delivered as a Film Maker as in his Mexican period..

At some point, the host of the Embassy, after having cook Hot Hot Chocolate....got a visit from Luis Buñuel spirit.... The video shows fragments of the event...starting with the medium session and followed by the reading of Walter Benjamin's dream Mexican Embassy by guess star Pablo Leon de la Barra, acting as him self ,one great mexican agent provocateur , curator and diletante ...finally by late night ...a bolero wanted to be played and heard....the great guitar playing of Puerto Rican musician and performer Daniel Moncada make it possible.The installation at Residencia 134 , is a project by Esther Planas related with her supposed first solo show eternally delayed by various odd ( maybe that God) reasons in Mexico DF ....Preparing the show, there where issues found and issues compiled as for raw material to be later distilled and synthesised ... 

One very relevant text and the title of the event , is Walter Benjamin's Mexican Embassy, a description on one dream he once had...

The idea of myth , travelling as to re-discover and re-trace.

The idea of an Embassy, a space where all things "that nation" , could happen inside.. the little portion of magic territoire where one could pray at other's God's

If we understand God as religion and religion as culture, opposed to ritual as folklore

in the way The West has managed to represent the Otherness of such places as the lands where due to different politics of Colonisation at least one can still walk next to the real owners and natives of the territoire...

The knowledge of Planas ancestors living somewhere on the country... as a note about a grand father doing his first communion at one very complicated to pronounce address.. Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz and specially the idea or "her room" at the convent, a place full of books and instruments where to studie and write and play...The dream about Peyote rituals that have been narrated to her by friends travellers, a pop video clip that was shot on location in the towns of Garcia, Xilitla, and the Icamole Desert in Mexico ...The notes, films compiled, about Caridad Mercader and her son The Killer of Trostky , Las Aventuras de Olmeco Beuys , by Pablo Helguera, plus a whole stream of conscience like references to other works , lectures and material that has been found along the journey of preparation for a show that it maybe never touches Mexican ground...

The context is the residence /studio/ house of Planas and there lots of works hung related to this project, Gold Monochromes , Mayan Magic Penetrable, Ritual Dress, unfinished Panels ...

The event is about a call to the spirits of such ancient Gods from "a petite coin du monde anglaise " as if in a Mexican Embassy more close to the sort Des Esseintes would have created at his house than a real one... 

The idea of Mexico trough out the topics of narration and memories of all sorts of non Mexican people , The Visitors, The Colonisers, The Exiled...The Ultimate Outsider Dream.....

                                             Las Aventuras de Olmeco B by Pablo Helguera

sequence of stills from Luis Buñuel film 

El Angel Exterminador 

Mathias Goeritz Golds 

Esther Planas and Marco Rountree Cruz 

Capital Pedro Planas en Jalapa , Mexico

The film  ( part one)

Salvador D and beautiful surreal  hair of guest....

 face book page ..........

Freud's Mexico

Into the Wilds of Psychoanalysis
Rubén Gallo

Freud's Mexico is a completely unexpected contribution to Freud studies. Here, Rubén Gallo reveals Freud's previously undisclosed connections to a culture and a psychoanalytic tradition not often associated with him. Freud found a receptive audience among Mexican intellectuals, read Mexican books, collected Mexican antiquities, and dreamed Mexican dreams; his writings bear the traces of a longstanding fascination with the country. 

In the Mexico of the 1920s and 1930s, Freud made an impact not only among psychiatrists but also in literary, artistic, and political circles. Gallo writes about a "motley crew" of Freud's readers who devised some of the most original, elaborate, and influential applications of psychoanalytic theory anywhere in the world: the poet Salvador Novo, a gay dandy who used Freud to vindicate marginal sexual identities; the conservative philosopher Samuel Ramos, who diagnosed the collective neuroses afflicting his country; the cosmopolitan poet Octavio Paz, who launched a psychoanalytic inquiry into the origins of Mexican history; and Gregorio Lemercier, a Benedictine monk who put his entire monastery into psychoanalysis. 

After describing Mexico's Freud, Gallo offers an imaginative reconstruction of Freud's Mexico. Although Freud himself never visited Mexico, he owned a treatise on criminal law by a Mexican judge who put defendants—including Trotsky's assassin—on the psychoanalyst's couch; he acquired Mexican pieces as part of his celebrated collection of antiquities; and he recorded dreams of a Mexico that was fraught with danger. Freud's Mexico features a varied cast of characters that includes Maximilian von Hapsburg, Leon Trotsky and his assassin Ramón Mercader, Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera—and even David Rockefeller. Gallo offers bold and vivid rereadings of both Freudian texts and Mexican cultural history.

About the Author

Rubén Gallo is Director of the Program in Latin American Studies and Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Cultures at Princeton University. He is the author of Mexican Modernity: The Avant-Garde and the Technological Revolution (MIT Press, 2005).

film still from Buñuel's  El Angel Exterminador 

Oro Dorado Installation with Penetrable ....

Gipsy Dance Rock Mix at La Loseta a project by Radames Juni Figueroa

a mini resume of the show at the site in Radames Juni's on a warm night in San Juan.........

the video piece      

Performance Detourned Song, Lip singing , dancing .
Questioning commerce , publicity strategies as art practice...
Video screened at LA LOSETA , a project by Radames Juni Figueroa , San Juan, Puerto Rico .
25 Septiembre 2011
Copy Right : Esther Planas VEGAP 2011

Gypsy Dance Rock Mix is a project for the space La Loseta , curated by artist Radames Juni Figueroa at his place in San Juan Puerto Rico. The project consist of 12 guest artist and curators responding to the invitation by Radames to interact at his space. The outcome of the whole 12 shows will be published on a book wile the space and the " gallery" will disappear for good .
The installation consisted of a screening of the film Ase ere de je which is a lip singing /dance home recorded performance by Esther Planas wile listening to the major  viral successful song ASEREJE , a bottle of spanish wine containing fake spanish flowers, a container with Tinto de Verano a punch called Gypsy , and a series of detourned . tunned, manipulated posters on topic photoshop from films related to the topic of Quinqui Cinema ....
The video manipulation on I movie , as a playful , home made youtube specimen of the so many at the moment is a comment  on other new media works and the soft blurry line that divides art from non art .
As part of the show, there was a specially selected DJ YOuTube by Esther Planas of songs and films related to the theme and a blog for any one up for research....

The invite

The sound
Dj//Play List by Esther Planas

click on the screen to go to youtube for the whole selection !! enjoy!

Escuela de Calor at eme3 Barcelona 2 July 2011

(Indeed, the very concept of “daily life” is itself a product of industrialism and the urban.) Martha Rosler.
////////////////////Calor en eme3 : An extract cut and paste fragments from Martha Rosler essay published at E-Flux Journal //////Culture Class: Art, Creativity, Urbanism, Part 1 E-Flux Journal http://www.e-flux.com/journal/view/190///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

Lefebvre’s emphasis on the city contradicted the orderliness of Le Corbusier, whom he charged with having failed to recognize that the street is the site of a living disorder, a place, in his words, to play and learn; it is a site of “the informative function, the symbolic function, the ludic function.”⁵ Lefebvre cites the observations of the foundational urban observer Jane Jacobs, and identifies the street itself, with its bustle and life, as the only security against violence and criminality. Finally, Lefebvre notes—soon after the events and discourses of May ‘68 in France—that revolution takes place in the street, creating a new order out of disorder.

The theoretical underpinning for a renovated cityscape came primarily from the earlier, utopian “millennial” and interwar designs of forward-looking, albeit totalizing, plans for remaking the built environment. It was not lost on the city poor that so-called urban renewal projects targeted their neighborhoods and the cultural traditions that enlivened them. Cities were being remade for the benefit of the middle and upper classes, and the destruction of the older neighborhoods—whether in the interest of commercial, civic, or other forces, such as enhanced mobility for trucks and private cars—extirpated the haunts of those beyond the reach of law and bourgeois proclivities, adversely affecting the lives and culture of the poorer residents. Martha Rosler, Culture Class: Art, Creativity, Urbanism, Part 1 E-Flux Journal http://www.e-flux.com/journal/view/190

Escuela de Calor , referencia al titulo de la cancion de Radio Futura, a la letra, ( arde la calle al sol del poniente..) continuando con la postura de buscar y re-interpretar a varios "maestros" grecolatinos, desde Diogenes, Socrates, Aristoteles a Joseph Jacotot o Jaques Ranciere.........

NOT YET/// AGORA NAO/// THE BARBER SHOP /// LISBON///

2011
Agora não/Not yet (w/ Filipa Ramos)
Performance and installation.
«A letter was sent to various persons - dear acquaintances and some admired individuals - inviting them to share a non-done projects of theirs. The ongoing collection of these contributions is thus becoming an anthology of non-pursued thoughts. Each of them will be publicly opened one by one and displayed in an event that will take place on the evening of the 17th of June 2011, from 6pm onwards, at The Barber Shop in Lisbon. Simultaneously, José Albergaria, from Change is good, Cláudia Castelo and António Gomes, from barbara says, will be producing in real time the catalogue of the project.»
>> List of participating artists (in order of appearance): Davide Balula, Laetitia Badaut-Haussmann, Nicolas Chardon, Hugo Canoilas, Von Calhau, Francis Upritchard, Stephania Galegati, Pedro Neves Marques, Pauline Curnier-Jardin, Nico Angiuli, Sara & André, Karina Bisch, Daniel Barroca, António Contador, Elisa Pône, Diego Perrone, Celine Condorelli, Ângelo Ferreira de Sousa, Invernomuto, Cesare Pietroiusti, André Uerba, Mathieu Laurette, Ignasí Aballí, Carla Cruz, Susana Pomba, Becky Beasley, Filipa Ramos, Marco Raparelli, Simone Berti, Rita Sobral Campos, Fernando Mesquita, Alexandre Estrela, Gerlach en Koop, Ana Cardoso, Francisco Queirós, Pablo León de la Barra, Lisa Tan, João Simões, Jacopo Miliani, Stephen Lichty, Tiny Domingos, Iacopo Seri, António Ortega, Isola and Norzi, Chiara Fumai, Esther Planas.

URBAN ENVIROMENTAL SPEEDY INTERACTION SEQUENCES

a No Dance Dance project

Movement paused on positions

Positions by process of a trajectory

becoming pose, repetition and difference

a dance of the pose and the captured seconds

posing by the building I fear and love

Inside huge Ivy arches

Like ancient coffins containers

Found Sculptures which to activate

by detour and misuse

so many possible existing body exercises,

coded and decoded

eternal production of shapes containing

all of the whole history of movement ,

all expelled , devoid and trimmed down to zero

in the territories of a body , at the subjectivity of stillness

at the bottom of the towers where nothing but the cube is

welcomed.

Urban filaments, an encounter at  a zone and

an area where a contingent has taken place , the

composition of the proportioned cubes and squares

mounted on to each other, the wild growth of the ivy

and the presence of the body that echoes both:

the basic equation and encounter of numbers intended

at the reproduction of the same

Interrupted, stillness,a body placed against the grain of time

stasis feeding a movement awaking from a control delusion

algebraic character and mathematical rigour trying to find forms

that could still hold a transfusion of the visual in to the corporeal

in situ at the present tense at the reduced instants.

A pause and a pose that prolongs its timing
that tries to inhabit a sort of lapses a quietness of the essential
against the super dance the super gestures and its excess
at display an attempt to extract from instantaneity
a form of preserving the singularity of  its existence

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND INSIDE THE WHITE CUBE

  

Maria Aguero, Tariq Alvi and Alex Carvalho 

   Edward Dorrian , Tariq Alvi and Marc Hulson 

Richard Crow , Esther Planas and visitors 

Audience at the opening talk Close Encounters 

  Cedar Lewisohn  and Maria Aguero 

Joan Morey's Installation " The Eye of The Beholder "

Pablo Leon de la Barra , Alex Carvalho and friend