ESTUDIO II

The breeze carries lies,
And let he who says he doesn’t lie
Tell you he doesn’t breathe
(Spanish folk song)

Heavy flamenco song, long song, song that belongs to someone, stolen voice, afillá (hoarse) voice, the voice this way, a gruff squawk, voice in song, voice of argument, ideal voice, the flamenco song written with spelling mistakes, personal song? The monkey sings from memory, song by right, oral voice, one’s own voice? Imaginary voice or voice of the mad, noisy voice, voice painted, strip back the voice, irate voice, legitimate voice, spiritual voice, voice of yarn, bastard song, regulated song, gifted song, ghostly song, spectral voice, voice of rubbish or voice of truth, sing another tune, common voice? Song of fire, physical voice, bloodied voice, spatial voice, deliberated voice, reflective voice, song of boy or girl, speechless voice, singular voice? Sing with no mouth, truthfully lying voice.

Niño de Elche

There is a lie attributed to forms of art-making, practices from which, paradoxically, a kind of purity or authenticity is demanded. The voice, in its materiality, takes on a channelling of this complexity, showing the being that it is blurred, shaped by impurities, haziness. But maybe it is these textures — those that show the fumbles of speech and thought — that make a being alive and changeable. The Breeze Carries Lies is an experimentation which, as in all experimental processes, is in progress and attempts to speak to us of the voice or voices as body, space and hope. Denying the veracity of the voice is to broaden its conception and thus be able to displace us towards places that encourage us to continue observing the quantity of linguistic, sound, conceptual, spatial and communicative possibilities it offers. Here it is about understanding the lie not as harmful per se, but as something that can grant us the constant possibility of discovering new paths from which to rethink our new forms of social, cultural and political relations.  

Niño de Elche (Elche, 1985) is an “inter-disciplinary” artist whose broad-ranging work synthesises strands of genres such as flamenco, rock, contemporary music, freeform improvisation, electronic music, poetry, visual arts and performance. At this intersection of forms and language notably stands his project Vaconbacon, cantar las fuerzas (2011), drawing from the painter Francis Bacon, with the collective Bulos y Tanguerías, and his albums Voces del Extremo (voted best album of 2015 by music critics), Antología del Cante Flamenco Heterodoxo (2018), Colombiana (2019) and albums in collaboration with Toundra (Exquirla) and Los Planetas (Fuerza nueva). Also of note are his diverse performances at the Sónar Festival, with Los Voluble and Israel Galván, and collaborations with performing artists that include Angélica Liddell, Juan Carlos Lérida, Belén Maya and María Muñoz, to name but a few. Moreover, he has published two books, No comparto los postres (2016) and Morbo legítimo (2019), both published by Bandaàparte Editores. In 2019 he was awarded the Inédit Festival Prize for the best Spanish documentary with Niños somos todos (Inner Kids), and he is currently finishing his work based on research into the sonic legacy of Val del Omar with a sound installation entitled Invisible Auto Sacramental. A Sonic Representation from Val del Omar in the Museo Reina Sofía, and his latest record La distancia entre el barro y la electrónica. Siete diferencias valderomarianas, produced by Miguel Álvarez-Fernández.         

Produced at the crossroads between the vocal cords and physical movement of the body, in an exercise to “listen” how a dance sounds, Tutuguri is a polyphonic performance that takes its title from Tutuguri. The Rite of the Black Sun (1936), the well-known poem by Antonin Artaud.

Tutuguri explores the asynchronism between movements and sounds, in a perpetual conflict of opposites where the body of the person dancing is inhabited by whispers, animal grunts, child noises, strange sounds, conversations, song, and abdominal sounds that transport us to a spectral landscape of voices, sketching a state of connection between sound flows and affection.     

Flora Détraz (Paris, 1988) is a choreographer and performer who initially trained in classical Ballet and Literature. She studied with Maguy Marin in the National Choreographic Centre of Lyon and completed her training with the Choreographic Study, Research and Creation Programme (PEPCC) at Forum Dança, Lisbon. As a choreographer and performer, she worked with Marlene Monteiro Freitas on the piece Bacantes-Prelude to a Purge (2019). Furthermore, she has worked or studied with artists such as Vera Mantero, Lia Rodrigues, Meredith Monk, Loïc Touzé, Meg Stuart and Jonathan Burrows, all of whom have had some influence on her way of working and her current concerns. Since 2013 she has developed her own research around the relationships between the voice and movement, culminating in pieces like Peuplements (2013), Tutuguri (2016) and Muyte Maker (2018). Her forthcoming creation, Glottis, will be presented in November 2020 at the lkantara Festival in Lisbon, and, subsequently at the December Dance Festival in Bruges.    

Martínez Troncoso responds to the invitation to continue exploring the relationships between action and language, between orality and body gestures, with a proposal conceived for this edition of ESTUDIO, upon which she reflects with the following words:

(And the formulation of these words does not come easily, similar to having a lump in your throat).

I recall a few years back the silence that settled in my throat as I became open-mouthed¹… silence from dryness? Today this silence settles through a closed mouth, a full mouth. In a closed mouth no air can get in and, on a du mal à respirer! The nares still remain. What would my nares say if they could speak?

(so much time for so few words to be formulated, although words are not that much because there are many words here inside, but the tension or attention of how one feels at the time… [delirium of a garden])

— …ma bouche est un creux, a garden, a hole, an inside and outside, an over- and underground, land or a den to clear, oxygenate, caress.

(I imagine this coming 22 October with wind, touching and caressing our skin...)

With souffle I entitle or call — perhaps it is a calling — this moment, which in Spanish means: breath, breathing, blowing, wind… and with the exclamation mark of its verb souffler: Blow! Breathe Out! Huff! Puff! Growl! Snort! Breathe! Breathe in! Take a breath! Push! Fly! Fly away!   

¹Avoir le souffle coupé, literal translation: to be short of breath.

Loreto Martínez Troncoso (Vigo, 1978) works primarily with writing as her subject matter, the word (the act of saying), its tempo, rhythm, (its) silence… taking on the form of publicly “speaking up”, sound pieces, written texts and also interventions in and with spaces. In addition to collaborations with different artists, her work has slowly but surely opened out to other voices, the voices of others, particularly with Opereta A~Mar (2014) Entre[hu]ecos (2017) and El eco de tu voz - l'écho de ta voix (2018). In recent years we have been able to experi-mention her “writings” in her exhibition in CGAC (Santiago de Compostela, 2019); her exhalations and song in Chambre n°53, (soupervues, Vaison-la-Romaine, 2018); her sighs and éclats in “Mutaciones: Vidas secretas” (Museo Picasso, Buitrago del Lozoya, 2018); her words and non-words in Ah ha! (PAN! – Privé/Public, IF, Limoges, 2017) and Et la terre tourne, (Parades for FIAC, Paris, 2016); her respirations/expirations in Por dónde comenzar, si est-ce qu’il y a un commencement quelconque (Galería PM8, Vigo, 2017), and her silence in El aire que yo respiro es el aire que tú respiras (Parc Saint Léger, Pougues-les-Eaux, 2016).

I propose an act of resistance by tying aspects such as the phonetic transformation of my vocal flow, the notion of circularity or the idea of purging through perseverance, placing my body in collision with language and a certain will for geographical and identity oscillation.

Nazario Díaz

Speak to Me, Body is part of Looking for Pepe, a study that started in 2016 and sets out from the figure of Córdoba artist Pepe Espaliú (1955–1993), unfurling a series of investigations around the body, language and territory.  

The work takes its title from the text Juan Vicente Aliaga wrote in conjunction with the exhibition held in Pabellón Mudéjar in Seville in homage to Espaliú in 1994, a year after his death from AIDS-related complications. The interest in how Espaliú developed links between his work and his circumstances, marked by illness, at a social and political period undergoing a major transformation, inspires a work linked to the subject matter that mutates or disappears, and the idea of the erosion and restraint of a body understood as physical and social existence.    

Looking for Pepe opens out from the mutual involvement of Jorge Gallardo, Jesús Alcaide, Cuqui Jerez, María Jerez, Isaak Erdoiza and Ion Munduate; and Speak to Me, Body has gestated as research inside the framework of the 2016/2017 MA in Performing Arts and Visual Culture and was premiered on 29 November 2018 in Elipsiak, a series curated by Isabel de Naverán for Azkuna Zentroa, Bilbao.

Nazario Díaz (Linares, Jaén, 1985) develops his work primarily in the field of performing arts, focusing on the concepts of the body, the gaze and writing. He is part of the collective Vértebro, with Juan Diego Calzada and Ángela López, with whom he curated the festival Beautiful Movers in Córdoba. His experience of the MA in Performing Arts and Visual Culture at the University of Castilla-La Mancha, ARTEA and the Museo Reina Sofía has lent him a critical context in which to develop his project Looking for Pepe, which brings together past interests around two main concepts: presence and resistance. As a performer he has worked with, among others, Jorge Gallardo, Isaak Erdoiza and Societat Doctor Alonso. Since the end of 2018, he has lived in Bilbao, where he participates in two collective contexts of learning: PICA, an intensive programme of support for a temporary community of artists and researchers, held in Azala (Vitoria-Gasteiz) and run by Idoia Zabaleta and Luciana Chieregati, and the programme Invitación, a proposal by Coletivo Qualquer to investigate and exchange methodologies and tools from the sphere of live arts. At the present time, he is working on Otro borrado a través de la insistencia, as a solo work, and Conversation pieces, with Basque choreographer Isaak Erdoiza.