SUMMARY
FRONT COVER by Julieta Triangular
HOM
Grains of light
To be or not to be
From entrails
Most beautiful
Broken mask
Velvet noise
Alma mater
After the wake
Sew and play
Brut nature
Des images fusionnées au coeur
Sex and the Chanteuse
Collages
NAU NUA JUNE 2011
FRONT COVER by Julieta Triangular
HOM
Grains of light
To be or not to be
From entrails
Most beautiful
Broken mask
Velvet noise
Alma mater
After the wake
Sew and play
Brut nature
Des images fusionnées au coeur
Sex and the Chanteuse
Collages
GRACE ELLEN BARKEY
Grains of light
“This a fact: there are more stars in the universe than grains of sand in the Sahara desert. Imagine that everything could speak. What a noise! Cosmic soundscape! Unbind your mind! International absurdities, universal illusions, cosmic disorientation. That’s what we need to keep mother earth spinning!” Grace Ellen Barkey looks for all that light while she builds with her own sand surrealist plays which make us see the light on shade. This door is too small (for a bear) (2010) is her brand new choreographic work in which she’s looking for deliverance again.
Her art has also life beyond Needcompany and she has produced pieces like One (1992), Don Quijote (1993) and Tres (1995). Likewise, her work as a choreographer and actress let her have an acting role in Jan Lauwers creations like his recent The art of entertainment (2011) and previous The Snakesong Trilogy - Snakesong/Le Voyeur (1994), Caligula (1997), Needcompany’s King Lear (2000), Images of Affection (2002), No Comment (2003), The Lobster Shop (2006), The Deer House (2008) and his first filmic project Goldfish Game (2002).
Grace Ellen Barkey was born in Surabaya, Indonesia, and she studied at the Theater School in Amsterdam. Meanwhile she was developing her career as an actress, dancer and choreographer, she co-founded with Jan Lauwers Needcompany, incessant ray of new points of view on stage. Barkey is its full-time choreographer as well as author of some Needcompany’s works like Stories (Histoires/Verhalen) (1996), Rood Red Rouge (1998), Few Things (2000), (AND) (2002), in which her creativity in music, theatre and dance flow in a fascinating natural way, Chunking (2005), for which she received a great recognition, and The Porcelain Project (2007), in which she wondered about the artistic disciplines boundaries, creating an amazing choreographic work and a porcelain installation along with Lot Lemm, her most important artistic partner, who sculpted some pieces that allowed Barkey to show a conversation between bodies and objects, lines and curves, liberating eroticism and darkness.
This door is too small (for a bear) (2010)
Text by Juan Carlos Romero
OF MONTREAL
To be or not to be
“I know there ain’t no one person that everybody else in the world hates on, wants to die, sometimes I do think it’s me, like I’m in a fight simulator and I am crushing the birth of any potential memory I’m still way erect for you, not going to lie. You cured me of my death anxiety, only took you two tries. The head scene dropped the vaccine, and I’ve chosen a very powerful penance” That’s the opening for False Priest (Polyvinyl Records, 2010), an extract from the song I Feel Ya’ Strutter, in which anxiety towards death becomes a psychedelic expression that overflows venues around the world. Their concerts are an explosion of vitality in contrast to their lyrics which are seized by an eternal to be or not to be.
“You’ve got that kind of beauty that makes people nervous, I know it’s fucked, but before we got together I even hooked up with one of your cousins. Just to feel somehow closer to you. Because I knew like you guys were best friends and you talked everyday and it was thrilling to touch something that had touched you. In my head you were like this goddess, but, in fact, you’re just a crazy girl”. Everything comes under colorful confetti and bohemian lights without thinking where to go but by the way, even in circles. At the end of the album, they release the terrible and accurate conclusion “If you think God is more important than your neighbor you’re capable of terrible evil”. Even in creativity.
An Of Montreal performance involves dancing until the wee hours of the morning hugging a Mexican wrestler and wearing phosphorescent underpants and a water gun with which to quench the thirst of vitality. If you shoot you can kill boredom, if only for a moment. The new album by Of Montreal does not disappoint performed live, rather it expands. They draw horizons that may be short-lived, and even random, but the suns they hide in them light us ‘til an “anything is possible” and if everything has been invented is to invent it again. Their sea waves are chromatic and produce sounds dripping in our mind to draw it differently, more open and permeable to the deep arguments.
Text by Juan Carlos Romero
Photo courtesy of Primavera Sound
MARA MATTUSCHKA
From the entrails
There is no future, not for you, not for me and not even for them, even though we are all in it together and ideas keep flying around everywhere. Sugar cubes long ago ceased to be, dreams are broken and fixing them would be too expensive, just think about the bill for the labor. As with everything, in the end, it's best to buy a new one, except mine, which came out very well. My dream, and my cold turkey, grew in a rebellious frame, impregnated with breaths of Anger, Deren and Duchamp, and traces of Mara Mattuschka making love to an incredulous and spasmodic Walt Disney. The world changes, especially after aiming your memories at the rays of sunlight that are films like Legal Errorist and the way it’s lived.
Born in Sofia, Bulgaria, in 1959, is described as a punk filmmaker. For years, she lives in Vienna and has developed a fruitful career in film, painting and theater, all from studies in anthropology, applied arts to film animation and linguistics. She combines her creativity with education as a professor and is also a member of Austria Filmmakers Cooperative and committee member of ASIFA Austria.
Works like Parasymphatica (1985), S.O.S. Extraterrestria (1993), ID (2003) or those made by the choreographer Chris Haring Errorist Legal (2005) and Burning Palace (2009), demonstrate her iconoclasm. The first ones had Mattuschka starred playing the character Mimi Minus in order to explore madness, body and identity. In S.O.S. Extraterrestria a huge creature brings destruction, while ID shows our own identity in question being transformed into monsters adapted to social norms. It’s a raw Faust. Films with the enormous talent of Chris Haring represent a treaty of the movement from a very personal vision.
Text by Juan Carlos Romero
Photos courtesy of Transmediale Festival
All rights reserved
All rights reserved
EINSTÜRZENDE NEUBAUTEN
Velvet noise
Their music is sounding from the early eighties and finally they publish one of their classic albums under their own label. This is Silence is sexy (Potomac, 2011) which was first published under the label Mute Records in 2000. Silence is sexy and much more when you own your own one. Only from your silence you can convert your noise in dreamy velvet. Einstürzende Neubauten have already achieved their freedom.
The public who attended their concert at the Parc del Forum in Barcelona last May, looked over thirty years of industrial piping and compressed air tanks plowing vinyl and compact lasers in search of creative freedom. It was 1980 when this band from Berlin burst onto the Dilletanten Geniale Die Dada movement, known for their industrial-based sound of saws, drills and other tools. They gave their first concert at the Berlin club Moon on April 1, 1980, but the first album did not appear until November 1981, Kollaps (1981). It's been thirty years and Blixa Bargeld, N.U. Unruh, FM Einheit, who quit the band, and various musicians who have played with them, have declared war again and again on the creative conventions. Their tremendous intensity and rhythmic sound has been developed over the works like Zeichnungen des Patienten O.T. (1983), 1/2 Mensch (1985), Fünf auf der nach oben offenen Richterskala (1987), Haus der Lüge (1989) and Silence is sexy, the one re-edited now.
Text by Juan Carlos Romero
Photo courtesy of Primavera Sound
ANNE PIGALLE
Alma mater
She dances on the mystery of life with an incessant passion. Sensual in her poetry, full of humor and eroticism, elegant and timeless aesthetic, lives surrounded by the smoke of art whose cigars she rolls with a meticulous creativity to smoke them slowly just before the carnal outburst. Once there, it's all possible. She translates her instinct into music, photography, painting, poetry and life. That room is a place to be lost, if she lets you in, and eroticism emerges in every word, every whisper, every look as endless fields of accurate lights as a dagger or an unforgettable caress. She looks of understanding. L'Ame erotique.
Are you for real?
What do you think?!!
Music, painting, acting…is life enough?
Not enough time in the day, that’s for sure.
One of your paintings is called “Giving sex for free”. Do you think sex is an open door to freedom?
Desire is, in a way, but this is a statement about love – love can only be given for free.
Your brand new album is “L’Ame Erotique”. Where does your erotic soul come from?
This was the concept for my first art exhibition; men often (more than women) find it hard to marry love and eroticism – my work and concern comes from failed relationships and therefore the quest for understanding.
You sing to the “Saint orgasm”. Is orgasm a mystic experience?
Of course.
“...sour sugar...give me my pray...”. What do you pray for?
I pray for better understanding between people.
“With my blonde” video is introduced as made “in the name of ART, LOVE, TRUTH, PLEASURE AND FREEDOM. It stands against DOMINATION - Its cost is STYLE, PERSISTENCY, FRIENDSHIP AND LOTS OF BELIEF FOR A WORLD WITH MORE JUSTICE“. Are social conventions, including the sexual ones, made for domination?
Well I do think we are often taken for a ride – including how we should live our sexual lives – it would be good to see people think for themselves.
Surrealism has a main role on your art. Fantasy, imagination, dream and reality... Any boundary between them?
They are all art.
“X Amount” says “I want to fuck you and be the best, I want you to fuck me and put me to the test...I want to suck you and then eat your cream...”. Then you recite some words with an X: X file, seX, eXecution... X is also a symbol of mystery and banning. Why is banning linked to pleasure?
This poem has also a little humour to it, like a lot of what I do; in this case, this was a poem written for a boy/man I could not have –therefore, somehow, an erotic forbidden desire.
“E-rotica de toi” plays in its title with the current electronic ways of enjoying sex from anonymity. What do you think about cyber sex?
Well, it’s an oxymoron; you can fantasize on the net, but not have sex- good question by the way.
What does sex penetration mean to you?
It means.
“Sulfur” shows you whispering about la petite mort as a burning experience. Is life a self-destruction experience?
Well: sex, love, and vice versa, no, not an easy experience. But, then, you wouldn’t want it to be easy – the best things aren’t.
“Let love save us” is a painting where you claim against domination again. What is love?
“What is this thing called love?”... I spend my life redefining it – it is a complex cocktail, composed of various ingredients, different ones for different tastes... but yes... it will save us.
Puis-je entrer dans ta danse?
Bien sur!... Plus on est de fous plus on rit!!! ...
And I can’t stop dancing not only looking for flesh but for the feline soul who redefines love again and again.
Text by Juan Carlos Romero
Photo by Anne Pigalle
DEAN & BRITTA
The most beautiful
Dean Wareham & Britta Phillips are former members of the band Luna, authors of delight to the beat of electromagnetic vibration since 1992 when Dean Wareham formed the band and they achieved to record seven studio albums until filming the documentary Tell me do you miss me in 2005, ending the project. Dean Wareham had also formed the project Galaxy 500 while Britta Phillips had played in other bands and acted in film projects.
Dean & Britta project was born before the end of Luna. They recorded L'Avventura in 2003 where they covered favorite songs. After an EP of remixes called Sonic Souvenirs, under the direction of Sonic Boom, and then their second work arrived under the title Back Numbers (2007) followed by the some film soundtracks like The Squid & the Whale by Noah Baumbach.
Their latest work is 13 Most Beautiful ... Songs for Andy Warhol's Screen Tests (2010), a project born of the proposal by Andy Warhol Museum and Pittsburgh Cultural Trust to write songs around the films Screen Tests that Warhol shot as dumb portraits between 1962 and 1966 at the Factory. That project included their live performance during their projection, as part of a multimedia show. Everything has resulted in a double album of songs that are a delight for the listener.
From the suggestive initial Silver Factory Theme one realizes that the Warhol aesthetic fits like a glove into the tunes composed by Dean & Britta. Not a young man Anymore backs us to the early days of The Velvet Underground and I found it not so is a wet dream woven in the sky. Incandescent Innocence is ethereal, it floats on its own without needing to go anywhere. And all just draws Eyes smoke in my, where the visions are multiplying to the beat of guitar rhythms and chocked by emotion vocals lurking all sides and edges of the nightlife. Eventually the sun will rise, but nobody can tell.
Text by Juan Carlos Romero
Photos courtesy by Dean & Britta
ESTER BELLVER
Broken mask
So said André Breton, definer of the surreal, heavy-weight of the weightless, halitosis of the breathless: to love is to see our reflection with utmost clarity. Thus most of us prefer to look for what we have in common, to avoid any criticism. They call it love and jut leave it at that. Tantarantana Theater in Barcelona brings us ProtAgonizo born from a personal break up that will soon show us what our lives always are - a farce. Not many escape her because not many have the courage to face up to the abyss, without unpleasant and preconceived notions of what it is. So, courage to discover, from one to another, if there is any difference between the two, and if there is, to enjoy that difference as the immediate and changing answer. Ester Bellver, author and actress, breaks and tears.
Ester Bellver introduces us to the work as a play “basada en un texto nacido de la rotura personal que, por unos y otros motivos, un día le acontece a cualquiera. La vida pareciera detenerse y entonces se puede contemplar con asombro el personaje que le ha tocado representar en esta farsa. El descubrimiento de que uno no es uno. Su desmoronamiento. El abismo de no saber.” The experience is devastating, but the magnificent Bellver’s performance might suggest us that the text falls short to her enormous resources as an actress. Still, the breaking the mirror that she offers us is always uncomfortable, like a rawer vision of Sunset Boulevard (1950) in which Billy Wilder stripped the game of vanity mirrors.
In the work of Bellver we get the horror of breaking her own farce letting out her breath on our faces. “Una actriz contempla extrañada su imagen frente al espejo del camerino. En él se le irán apareciendo, como en una película, los diferentes escenarios transitados en su vida, reviviendo con ello los papeles representados en el teatro y en la revista de los años 80, género en el que debutó como artista… el resentimiento, los miedos, el éxito y fracaso del personaje que representa su vida y las múltiples caras que ha interpretado en la escena le hacen poner en cuestión su propia identidad. La actriz, enfrentada a si misma sospecha, “esa no soy yo”. Una rotura del espejo en mil pedazos, en mil caritas, anuncia su ‘última representación’.” And it hurts, believe me, it hurts to see someone being honest with a value that no one has. Breaking our own schemes is considered as a social defeat and not as an advance, so that turns ProtAgonizo into a break up catharsis if one understands that the conventions only lead to social success if we pay a high price, the self-denial. To applaud Esther Bellver is to applaud the talent, the value of doubt and love for which there is no breaks or ties, but vital stimulus.
Text by Juan Carlos Romero
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