SS

In Residence:
May 15, 2011 - June 3, 2011
Discipline:
Performance, Theatre
Country:
Chile

SS is a singular collaboration between Manuela Infante and Camila Marambio.

Manuela Infante (theater director) and Camila Marambio (curator) met in Amsterdam in the winter of 2006. Manuela was studying for her Masters in Cultural Analysis at the Amsterdam University, while Camila was at the de Appel curatorial programme. It was a chance meeting that lead to a rich exchange of views, references and opinions about each other’s respective fields of practice, theater and visual arts. Manuela is a theater director with a renowned career, known mostly for her radical revisions of famous historical figures at the mercy of a cunning mis-en-scene that confronts the viewer with the veiled guises of theater, (www.teatrodechile.cl). Camila is a curator who consistently challenges exhibition making by staging events that invite the spectator to inhabit the gallery space in radically different ways with a look towards establishing new relationships between the viewer and the work. Thus, Manuela and Camila’s meeting was a fruitful one, forging a series of collaborations that are as of now underway.

After embarking on numerous journeys and investigations together, SS has found that some adventures require that they reach beyond their own disciplines and fields of knowledge. In such cases SS naturally invites new players to join in on the creative process with the desire to make both collective and individual work. So, in each new iteration SS transforms itself, broadening the languages with which to explore the questions that trouble and the curiosity that drives.

 

The age of reason attacked magic by means of visibility. With the modern divide between natural science, religion, and art, mediums and conjurers were condemned to be called illusionists, and were from then on stripped and set before audiences to practice their craft as mere simulators of priests. They became simply actors, professional illusionists. Modern magic was born. What is of interest to us is the fact that it nevertheless began to grow popular precisely by making irreverent use of modernity’s most precious weapon: science.

It is not a matter of truly believing or not, for we know we are at the theatre, but a matter of attending the event of modernity self-destructing, of machines not producing objects but making them disappear, of perception not showing us empiric truth but working towards our own deception, of bodies not bound to gravity but flying, of the visible becoming invisible. For is it not this what we all wish to experience when we attend a magical performance? We wish to recover a sense of obscurity, we wish to not understand, we wish to be deceived. We wish to momentarily and voluntarily suspend our habit of falling into certainty. What’s he building in there? is a performance research project that brings into collaboration a theater director, a magician, a curator, and a visual artist, to inquire upon the production of magical machines or objects, and the implication of science in this process. Questions such as, What would you like to see disappear? What do you want to cease to see? What do you want to cease to understand? What do you want to obscure? What that you already know would you like us to transform into a mystery? will be posed to the community. The answers received will be taken as the objectives to be fulfilled by, and will lead to the actual construction and performance of, magical mechanisms or objects.

 

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