SYNOPSIS
Virgin Mary thinks that humans will soon collapse if we don't do something emotionally intelligent. Imma sips her soup with relisch; she is about to receive an unexpected visit. Oriol doesn't know that today will be the last day he is able to look at the works like any given retired. Montse can't dance anymore since she started living underwater. And Mochi... oh, Mochi! We want to live to a hundred years, but who will take care of us and treat us with dignity, respecting our freedom? Was this, the progress? .
THE ARTISTIC DIRECTOR WORDS
It was an unmitigated triumph. A victory of life over life itself. Living and growing old with dignity. And so... what happened?
We ignore everything that is not productive or reproductive fullness. An ageist, discriminatory treatment determined by the aging of a body. A collapse of the humanism we took for granted. A kind of bullet that we shoot at ourselves now, so that it fully impacts all of us in a few years.
This collapse puts the atavistic senses that we had exiled to the highest shelves of the bookshelf in our grandparents' house on alert. A kind of fear of ourselves that makes us work on the naive search for meaning, exercising the memory of the body. Reasoning with the tension of our muscles, with the fixed gaze and the gesture that unites: survival instinct and chaos. Writing about who we were. Trying to restore the primary order of all things. Of when we were people.
Joan Arqué Solà
Marta Riera Pi
martar@teatreaurora.cat
We propose scenic and audiovisual devices for educational centers as a research tool on old age, based on memory and the body as main elements for research. In this way, we offer students an accessible format to create artistic pieces linked to the exploration of their immediate environment and discover new interdisciplinary formats.
An exhibition of large-format photographs that covers from the documentary field the problems that vulnerable bodies encounter during old age: forgetfulness, isolation and social indifference, family uprooting, dependency, the digital divide, loss of autonomy, as well as everything that makes old age an indispensable vital moment and that gives it meaning: love or connection with the environment.
We talk about problems that revolve around the challenges that contemporary society faces regarding life and the care of the elderly at this stage of life, as well as their indispensable role in societies and families.
The gaze of the photographer Oriol Casanovas Puigjané places his protagonists in non-hegemonic, disturbing, intense, incompatible, contradictory or transforming spaces. Spaces defined by the French philosopher Michel Foucault as "heterotopic", refuge spaces, understood as worlds inserted in another that act as a mirror of what is outside.
And a space inspired by a peepshow that focuses on the obscenity of old age. In what we do not want to see because it is not pleasant to us or we do not recognize ourselves naturally. The photographer Marta Garcia Cardellach explores the possibilities of eroticism and desire as vanishing points of these problems.
The body is leaving us. Among others, symptoms of dementia appear that affect memory, thinking and cognitive abilities to be autonomous people. However, despite being old, the body continues to desire. How does a body that is socially parked satisfy desires? Can eroticism be a way to escape and subvert social control? Can eroticism be a way of remembering? As Barthes says: "the transgression of the body lies in its obscenity."
THE PHOTOGRAPHERS
Oriol Casanovas Puigjane
He has been working professionally as a photographer since 2001. He has published nationally and internationally in media as diverse as “Lonely Planet Magazine”, “Chinese Photographer's Magazine” or “The Rough Guide” travel guide. He has also worked as a photographic producer in gastronomy books with the publishing house "El Triangle". He was awarded the "Humanity Photo Awards 2015" (nomination Award), awarded by the Chinese Anthropological Association and UNESCO for a work on the Carthusian Community of Santa María de Montalegre. He has also been awarded the "Hotusa" prize in the international contest "Eurostars Grand Marina Photography Award 2015" with a work on Gaudí's Modernism. In 2016 he was awarded in the "International Photography Awards" contest for the report "The library in the watertank" with the "Honorable mention". He has been the photographic director of “Tiana't” magazine (2012-2019) and has been part of the “Our Place World Heritage” photographic project that documents World Heritage Sites around the world for the UNESCO photographic archive. .
Marta Garcia Cardellach
A photographer with a degree in Humanities with a postgraduate degree in participatory and therapeutic photography, she deepens her training at the Photographic Heritage Center of Santiago de Chile (2013) and at the Center for the Art of Photography in Lectoure (2017). She has exhibited at the Photopatagonia festival (Argentina), by the National Council for Culture and the Arts (Santiago de Chile), at the Casa Elizalde in Barcelona, at the Casal Pere Quart in Sabadell, among other spaces in Catalonia. He has worked for the Photographic Social Vision Foundation, created the Construïm Mirades photo-pedagogical collective (2017-2020) with Oriol Segón and Xenia Gasull (Mecanic, Documentary Image Center), organized creative photography workshops for children and refugees in Sweden and Germany (2016-2019) working in social integration entities. Since 2019 she has been carrying out participatory photography projects, she has been awarded by the Lacetània Awards for art and culture, first prize in photography at the Besmina festival Barcelona and finalist in "Miradas con voz" by Médicos del Mundo. She is part of Nilak Circ Teatre Itinerant and the second production of Cultura i Conflicte.
