"I DON'T REMEMBER" /
Solo exhibition / Sanatorium Gallery, Istanbul / March 2012.
For her exhibition at Sanatorium, Luz Blanco suggests a series of works of art that are orchestrated around the following sentence:
« I remember, I don’t remember, I think I remember, I don’t want to remember ».
The question of memory or recollection is a paradoxical one which involves that which we want memory to retain or not to retain, but which persists despite us. Additionally, memory can be compared to oblivion, sort of a sensitive balance, or rather a pure reconstruction of reality.
In this exhibition, memory expresses itself as an iconic work. With the help of these paradoxes Luz Blanco produces images as if they could capture fugitive memories. The drawings displayed are organized according to research carried out in history of cinema, a name and dateless history which is simply made up of some redesigned frames.
For Luz Blanco, cinema is a means of production of collective, heteroclite, dazzling and anonymous memories. It can be compared to the literary technique of cut-up, an experimentation which founds itself on fragmentation and the collage of texts, and is basically about dialectic montage.
These iconic fragments are formed through the association of sketches of narration which is the reason memory, as a reconstruction of reality, can happen.
Luz Blanco attempts to take us right into this very slit between memory and oblivion.
AVATAR - Portrait choregraphy of Mikiko Kawamura
2020
3 Drawings on Paper
70x 100 cm
This series of three drawings was created during lockdown, which could be called the Great Confinement* in reference to Michel Foucault, based on a video recording of a performance by Japanese dancer Mikiko Kawamura. These are drawings of video screens linked to the digital and post-digital paradigm.
Mikiko Kawamura is a dancer and choreographer. Born in Japan in 1990, she works on the broken, robotized, chaotic body, subject to the urban alienation specific to megacities (Tokyo). Sometimes described as an enfant terrible of dance, fallen to Earth from another planet, Mikiko Kawamura describes her dance as an attempt to express parallel worlds, constellations of possibilities that often go unnoticed. Dance Truck is a dance performance presented in 2019 in the streets of Tokyo, whose stage is the confined interior of a cargo truck. This traveling “box” becomes the space in which the accumulated energy is released, and the performance resembles a state of disappearance: trance. In a fusion of movements reminiscent of a primal impulse, the dancer surrenders her body to the bursts of a chaotic rhythm until she is exhausted.
Lockdown was a period of “testing” for millions of bodies forced to limit themselves, restrain themselves, and confine themselves to reduced, connected living spaces. This test acted as a necessary constraint but accentuated social alienation by limiting bodies condemned to express themselves solely through screens.
This performance by Mikiko Kawamura, created shortly before lockdown, seems to have already foreshadowed it. Mikiko plays with the expression of a Japanese doll, a very crazy interpretation of this explosive doll-like body, in a context of formatting and limitation of bodily expression, particularly in its relationship to images, screens, digital technology, and multiple boxes. The video recording of her performance seems to have been made with a simple phone that enters and settles in the confined space to reveal its spatial limitations. This digital recording, visible on YouTube, visible from my own home screen as my only connection, a digital window on the world that allowed me to create these three drawings.
I created these drawings during this period of physical and psychological withdrawal. Constrained by this confinement, I drew the body of a woman who exploded the limits of her stage box through the aesthetic play of madness in a padded cell. She was my fantasized avatar. My intimate projection. My model exploded her doll-like body through the image. Social distancing was compensated for here by a projection of myself onto another person, a kind of post-digital catharsis during this great confinement.
*In reference to Michel Foucault who, in 1961 (in his Madness and Civilization), spoke of the great confinement to characterize royal policy in the 17th century, which was more repressive than charitable towards beggars and marginalized people. This period marked the beginning of the process of social control of the underprivileged.