‘STILL_MÓVIL’ – Exhibition @ Bienal SESC de Dança 2013, Santos, São Paulo, Brazil [2013]

After Montevideo, Asuncion, Rio de Janeiro, Lima and Santiago, the STILL_MÓVIL exhibition opened at Bienal SESC de Dança 2013, Santos, São Paulo, Brazil

 

 

STILL_MÓVIL (2011-2015) is Vason’s first collection of co-creations with fifty choreographers, dancers and movement practitioners. Working with artists across South America, the project explored the relationship between stillness and movement, photography and dance, the image and the action. Each image was conceived as a new contemporary dance piece.

In 2011 La Red Sudamericana de Danza (an organization dedicated to the promotion and support of contemporary dance in South America) commissioned Manuel Vason to collaborate with fifty ‘experts of the movement’ with the aim to explore new strategies for the documentation of contemporary dance and, at the same time, generate a new testimony of the contemporary dance scene in South America.  Working in ten countries in South America, Vason developed a methodology, which focuses on workshops, exercises and exchange between the participants. The result of the project was an itinerant exhibition containing 45 large size images and smaller size images, videos, text, drawings and a sound installation describing the process.

In one of the text accompanying the exhibition Natalia Ramírez Püschel, (art critic and sociologist) described STILL_MÓVIL as:

‘This is not about photographically documenting bodies in movement. Neither is it about constructing a pose for the camera.  The concept of the project Still_Móvil is more complicated and asks us to openly observe the ways in which contemporary dance practices have been affected by other artforms. The project investigates the process of transformation of a dance piece into a photograph, an undertaking, which proposes asking whether that photograph could be considered as a dance experience, in what sense and why. The performance between the artist and his collaborators explores through the capacities of the photographic device, the transformation of the choreographers’ body as visual writing into a form that represents them. This encounter between dance, photography and performance, experiments with the possible relationships between the body’s presence and representation, movement and stillness, improvisation and organisation, spontaneity and construction, authenticity and artifice, intensity and language, process and ending. The process towards the images exhibited in Still_Móvil could be described as the creation of a photographic dance, developed with visual criteria, where the body captured in the composition signifies all that composition can possibly be.’

To accompany the STILL_MÓVIL exhibition La Red Sudamericana de Danza also commissioned a website and new essays by Zara Rodríguez Prieto, Andréa Bardawil, Fernando J. Garcia Barros, Alexandra Cuesta, Constanza Cordovez, André Lepecki, Natalia Ramírez Püschel, Helena Katz, Juliana Reyes, María José Cifuentes, Oswaldo Marchionda, Nayse López and Hayde Lachino.

 

‘Vason’s operation is to transform a pulsating coexistence of polyphonic possibilities into a final tonic chord.’

Helena Katz,

Art Historian and Dance Critic based in Sao Paulo,

 

‘Co-creation in this particular case implies a change in the role of the photographer. The photographer stops privileging his look through the objective to be a participant in the creation process.’

Zara Rodríguez Prieto,

Editor of Efimera Magazine

Efimera Revista, vol.3 n. 4, November 2012

‘Still_Móvil  is still here and there moving, simultaneously adding and multiplying, as a rhizomatic proposal, trans, inter, multi, poly … Its relevance is to combine pretexts, contexts, texts … to allow us to re-move, move, see … and thus understand each other.’

Fernando J. Garcia Barros,

Director of mARTadero Art Centre.