-Personal-
Multimedia and acrylic mirror pieces, 2022-2023.
-
1
Para Lucía.
Un tiempo presente se desenvuelve ante nosotros en extrema lentitud.
El tiempo carece de eventualidad.
Allí, lo único evidente es Villi.
Villi es un ser que encontramos impasible
inmerso en descoloradas montañas.
Su quietud puede leerse como una espera en alerta –algo se aproxima-.
De lejos, un murmullo reverbera, grave y profundo.
Acercándose, un ruido granulado gusta cosquillear nuestra piel.
El video muestra una existencia absorta por un aparente suspenso.
La impronta del suspenso es como la absorbente incomodidad de una palabra en la punta de la lengua.
Es decir, la llegada se anuncia primero como sensación, antes que como palabra.
Prestar atención a la gramática sensorial por medio la cual el suspenso se expresa abre un umbral de posibilidades entre contrarios. Entre lo que es movimiento y quietud; entre lo sensorio, pero también imperceptible; en intimidad con cierta mezcla de apatía; en la intensidad que a su vez es gran vacío; entre presencia y desolación; en un estado de naturalidad más de extrañeza; de centrado y dispersión; y de efimeridad que se transforma en permanencia.
2
Villi ahonda en su propia imperceptibilidad como cuerpo. Su figura se camufla parcialmente con unos espejos de formas extrañas, perdidos entre las manchas de luz y sombra. Villi actúa como una superficie perspicaz que trae al primer plano lo que de otro modo es incidental. Invierte jerarquías de percepción.
Sobre su cuerpo-como-fondo,
los destellos del día diseminan una luz cegadora.
Mínimo movimiento que ejerce en tal sosiego se transforma en efecto.
Al magnificar las expresiones sutiles de los ambientes,
un sonido atmosférico va in crescendo.
La combinación de atmósfera sonora y espejos deviene en una ligera oscilación de efectos
de centro a ejes, de ejes a centro
Situado en el centro de la imagen, Villi se balancea. Ese leve balanceo es un ejercicio activo que coreografía el entorno. Evidencia un esfuerzo de enfoque y de expansión.
De centro a ejes, de ejes a centro.
Me recuerda al esfuerzo con el que entrenamos en el ballet para lograr equilibrarnos en una postura.
Me he preguntado cómo surgió la necesidad humana no solo de movernos, sino también de quietud física,
de permanecer en posturas, como otro arte del baile. Con esta pregunta, estoy certera de que este video es una traducción contemporánea de la sensibilidad y forma de pensamiento que se adquieren no tanto al mirar el ballet, sino que al entrenarlo.
Villi surge de la conciencia en carne propia del movimiento interior del cuerpo. En el ballet clásico, las bailarinas permanecen en una misma postura por instantes; instantes que se hacen aún más eternos en el género romántico. Al sostenerse en sus posturas con delicadeza y precisión, ellas dan cuerpo y materia a una existencia y mundo muy particular. Crean un efecto de vacío, el mismo que Villi impone.
El alargamiento del tiempo que logra el cuerpo de bailarinas vence la gravedad. Nos elevan hacia un mundo etéreo con elementos fantásticos.
No obstante,
A la vez que las bailarinas utilizan la gestualidad de sus brazos para transformarse en míticos seres, su mirada es esquiva. La fantasía la tiñe un tono existencial y sombrío. Algo sucede que no es legible para el público. En las miradas sueltas de las bailarinas se asoman fantasmas de otros mundos. Ellas están aquí-pero-allá.
Entre un aquí –presente, fantasioso e íntimo- y un allá –resistente a nuestra intromisión-.
Esto se traduce en el video como la relación entre el efecto mágico de la luz y el rechazo / oclusión consecuencia de esa misma magia. Durante el video, la cámara avanza, constante, hacia Villi. La proximidad se acrecienta; la distancia se hace íntima y exalta los sentidos. La cercanía cambia la cualidad del sonido. El murmullo se matiza con pixeles veloces y agudos. Ocurre un cambio de frecuencia, no obstante respecto al cual Villi continúa, por un lado,
taciturno.
La magnitud de lo sutil, la magia que posibilita, se tensiona con ecuanimidad de su parte.
Nada lo perturba.
Por otro lado,
furtivo.
Hay un tipo de secreto que nunca revela.
Lo que se mantiene íntimo y propio de Villi es lo que nos mantiene en suspenso.
Envueltos por el vacío donde todo es profundamente sensorio, es entonces la manera en que Villi nos entrega como observadores a la melancolía. Entramos en un estado hiper sensible, dentro del cual la existencia es tanto difusa, en el sentido en que su secreto se revela muy lento, así como intensa y maravillosa.
3
Esto texto me lo imaginé primeramente como una carta. Y es que cuando Lucía me invitó a escribir sobre “Villi” sentí un pasado bailar dentro mío –un pasado algo distante en tiempo, pero cargado de afecto-. Fue una invitación a conectar con mi propia melancolía.
Más allá, lo importante que quisiera mencionar es que tanto Lucía como mi persona bailábamos. Ambas crecimos bailando ballet y por cosas de la vida, dejamos de bailar o más bien, el ballet se vino a manifestar en nuevos medios. Entonces, cuando Lucía me habló para que escribiera este texto, capté una búsqueda mutua de complicidad. Un guiño por estar y compartir ese sentir y entendimiento del baile que en ambas habita.
Así, este texto se desenlazó como apreciación del mundo introspectiva y expresivo que Villi crea.
Para una atenta percepción de todo, lo minúsculo y lo inmenso, lo presente y lo otro.
A esa existencia que Villi le baila y yo le escribo.
Credits:
Text by: Sofía Villena Araya.
Still photography: Daniela Campos Araya
Videography: Cristóbal Serrá Jorquera
Assistance: Pedro Cordero
Music track: Ovsicori
-Personal work-
Fangal (Bog) is a solo show exhibited at Cero Uno, a contemporary art space owned by artists in San José Costa Rica, from March 19th to May 15th, 2022.
-
Interview with Lucía Madriz, from Cero Uno gallery.
LM: You studied dance for 11 years in Conservatorio de Castella and also practiced among other choreographers like Maria Amalia Pendones and Vanessa de la O. You can feel that connection with dancing in plenty of your artwork. How has performing arts influenced your artistic production?
LHV: These mentors helped me understand my relationship with space and the ambiguity that exists inside and outside. Performing arts involve not just the audience's perspective but the performer’s point of view. I’ve always been interested in observing the movement, but also how it feels when executed.
LM: In your previous performances, the body tends to dematerialize. What’s your point of view on those pieces?
LHV: the body is matter inside a physical space, but it’s not limited; it also can expand and merge with space.
LM: In your general work, and for this art show, you use lots of mediums such as painting, sculpture, and performance. How do you articulate those languages in your work?
LHV: I choose the technique according to what I want to express. I’m interested in the process of production of an idea in different mediums, and then the use I make of these elements in the space or with my body.
Credits:
Cinematography: Rodert López.
Photography by Daniela Campos, Pablo Cambronero and Lucía Howell.
Music track: Ovsicori (listen to full version here)
-Personal work-
Nubarrón de casa is a performance filmed in November 2020, part of the work I did from the exhibition This Way at the Museum of Contemporary Art and Design in Costa Rica.
The video is an exercise about translating a digital 3D element (based on the path I do daily at home) into a physical space).
The title is Nubarrón de casa, which means a dark cloud inside a house.
The performance started as a writing exercise about the confinement during COVID-19, when it was not allowed to go outside and the only walkable space was the bedroom or other parts of the house.
Sometimes, my knees hurt. Maybe it’s because I’m staying still and don’t go for a walk. My wrists hurt from flexing them for too many hours. My face hurts. I’m crying too much. It feels like a balloon filled with water. I can barely open my eyes because they are too swollen. My chest hurts. My heart feels wrinkled. My body hurts while I pee. My body is filled with water; Mar says I must let the water come out.
Credits:
Performance: Lucía Howell.
Cinematography: Diego Arias Asch.
Music (live improvisation): Fabrizio Durán Villalobos.
Assistants: Amanda Yinat and Alejandro Bonilla.
*Pictures taken by Diego Arias Asch.
Screenings:
Together, Dec 2. Miami Art Week 2021. (Part of the screening night by La Galería Rebelde)
-Personal work-
Register of the work process during the exhibition This Way at the Museum of Contemporary Art and Design, Costa Rica 2020.
For more information about the exhibition, click here.
Corrección, text by Pablo Hernández: click here
-Personal work-
This art show is an exploration of perceptions and possibilities of a scenario. Actions, hints, and images. The artist alters those components and the emotional relation she has with those (objects and bodies) until making them unrecognizable, vulnerable to any meaning. From these exercises, Lucía produces a series of graphic and performative experiments, states (Estados) of a process that is based on transformation.
This text was written by Lucía Howell, Diego Arias Asch, and Kenneth Coronado.
Estados (states) was a solo show exhibited at Subsuelo, a contemporary art space hosted by Veinti4/Siete Galería in San José Costa Rica, from November 29 to December 12, of 2019.
Photographies and videos of the show taken by Diego Arias Asch.
Watch video of the exhibiton at: https://vimeo.com/383564778
-Graduation project, University of Costa Rica-
Project director: Esteban Piedra León.
Virtus: artistic installation as perceptual experimentation of a familiar space through multimedia technology.
This project is an alternative way of exploring a familiar place by recording the sounds of a main street in front of my childhood neighborhood and converting them into visual information (car alarms from the next bloc, bus engines getting closer, people talking) and filming the streets’ view from both sides and turning them into sound information (a lady with a dog might cross the street so quietly that we cannot hear their steps). The furniture or sculptures interpret the familiar space like an abstract organic landscape that subtly reminisces a living room. From there, and inverting the visual and sound information, I attempt to re-introduce my childhood street as an unknown place. In this project, the application of graphic design merges with other techniques not as a solution but as a tool for proposing questions and playing with the systematizations of graphic language.
-Personal work-
Oil on canvas and acrylic mirrors, 2018-2019.
Performance experiments with mirrors designed in illustrator and laser cut on acrylic mirror. Paintings were made using the images from my room and my body reflected on the mirrors.
These exercises were exhibited in the art show Estados.
Representation is always limited by our sight and how we’ve been taught to use it.
A dog study.
Starting with a portrait of my dog guided by sense of touch, then translated to a digital texture and inserted into Resolume Arena, which responds to external sound.
Also, the drawing was the guide to make a tactile surface, using fake fur fabric. The intention was to translate the 2D representation to raised effect that due to its material it reminds the sensation of petting the dog.
This was part of a series of experimentations and studio work during the art residency Alter Academia in 2018.
-Personal work-
In a route, the light, movement, sounds, and shapes perceived may be overlapped, generating a particular sensation. The versions of this route might be infinite.
Azur70 is a solo art exhibition at Alianza Francesa de Costa Rica (French Alliance of Costa Rica), during the month of July, 2016.
*People holding planta in the photography are visitors of the House Plants on Tour, by artist Sergio Rojas Chaves.
*Photography by Daniela Camacho and Carlos Vega.
-Personal work-
HUNT, talks about the power of our own image over ourselves, how we feel when we’re being observed, our image it’s not ours anymore, the owner is the person who takes control of it (such as the photographer or the watcher), the hunter, and what (or who) we see in the picture is the prey.
“...there’s a little bit of a depredator in the action of taking a picture. Taking pictures to people is to rape them, because you see them as they never see themselves, you know them as they never know themselves: it transforms people in objects that can be possesed symbolically. And so, the camera is a kind of weapon. Taking a picture to someone is to commit a kind of soft murder, worthy of a sad period of time, frightened.”
Susan Sontag, On photography, 1977.
Modelo y Situación (Model and Situation) is a research project guided by Pablo Hernández, Victoria Marenco, and Esteban Piedra with the participation of several visual arts artists and philosophy students. This project was part of the Program to Promote Experimentation in Creative Processes sponsored by the Cultural Center of Spain in Costa Rica.
The objective is to form, direct, and activate focal groups of artistic experimentation through conducted and continuous processes during four months.
The proposal was designed from an interpretation of the word "Model." On taking the term in its complex linguistic use, the residents approached its various meanings as an adjective, a substantive, or a verb.
First video: Untitled MYS, 2016. Video-mapping installation for Modelo y situación. Go to Vimeo
Second video: Video essay MYS, 2016. Film composition of art pieces by various participants of exhibition Modelo y situación. Go to Vimeo
More information about the project:
Casa Canibal
