From rescue kits to a shower of flower petals: what will fall from the sky during the Performance Biennial

The fifth edition of this Buenos Aires meeting will inaugurate tomorrow a new stage of high political content; will include actions that will coincide with the presidential inauguration

From the wall of Proa 21 in La Boca, in the middle of the Queer Art Festival , a street graffiti will call on Sunday to “end homosexuals . ” The following Saturday, hours before the presidential inauguration of Javier Milei , the focus will be on journalists: the coverage of the information will be subjected to the aesthetics of memes and TikTok to compose a “wild remix” of audiovisual pieces made in alive , in the National Museum of Fine Arts. And on Sunday the 10th, when Argentina celebrates forty years of democracy and inaugurates a new political era, “salvation kits” will fall from the sky over Buenos Aires with instructions to “survive capitalism, individualism and the denialism that stalks our society.” ”.

With this energy closely linked to social reality, the fifth edition of the Performance Biennial (BP.23) will be resumed , which began last February during the launch of the Microcentro Cuenta program. It will last until March 16, when thousands of flower petals will rain in Puerto Madero on the Puente de la Mujer. It will be the culmination of another original proposal by Marta Minujín , who in BP.15 invited the public to look for an “equal” or soul mate ; Now she will challenge herself to find through an application the “opposite”, or complementary soul , as it was for her for more than six decades her beloved “Drinks” from her.

The international presence will this time feature the contributions of Cecilia Vicuña , Chilean artist winner of the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale who will open an exhibition in Malba next week, and the Colombian María José Arjona , protagonist of a performance at arteba in 2019. While Vicuña will invite the public to carry out a “Quipu of encounter with the Río de la Plata” , on Saturday, December 9, Arjona will call in February to accompany her in other actions that will appeal to the collective imagination to “raise movements of social reconstruction and politics in the midst of the current crisis.”

“ Performance is putting the body into thought in a meeting space .” That is why the biennial is so important: because it allows artists to put their thoughts into practice before the eyes of the other and to both listen to each other, something that is fundamental today,” Graciela Casabé , director of this meeting and president of the entity, tells LA NACION. who organizes it: the Babilonia Foundation for Arts, Science and Culture. “ What is better than dialogue through art,” he adds, “and not through politics or football? Today the situation requires us to come together and act after thinking: where do we want to go as a society? “Is this the violence we want?

After a launch in 2015 that included the participation of Marina Abramovic , the biennial managed to go through the pandemic with flexibility and added for this fifth edition the support of Fundación Santander -through Patronage-, of the Ministry of Culture of the City of Buenos Aires and the Williams Foundation. Although there is no theme that functions as inspiration for the performances, a call was launched that invited artists “to think about forms of cultural resistance that recover certain slogans of humanism and cooperativism that are seen as in danger of extinction, since imagine alternative forms of the future ”.

A jury made up of Luciana Acuña, Mercedes Claus and Natalia Laube selected the projects of Ian Kornfeld, Lindalinda (duo made up of Romi Sak and Natalia Chami) and Fabián Gandini , and gave a special mention to Guido Ignatti . The latter will carry out the aforementioned intervention in La Boca, a palimpsest inspired by the headline of an article published in the magazine El Caudillo in 1975; Kornfeld, audiovisual pieces related to current news, and Lindalinda will launch stories of “rescue kits” in her action titled Rescue Equipment .

We will have to wait until February to see Involuntary Damage , Gandini's intervention on urban space that will “deconstruct a street accident in reverse . ” Time will also be altered in the performance that Vivian Galbán will perform in March with a giant camera obscura at the Larivière Foundation, as part of the guest programs.

“It is impossible to say that the world and our country are going through turbulent times without wondering if a sentence of that order has not already been emptied of meaning: was any moment in our history different? "Is it possible to experience one's own era as a series of peaceful events?" observes the jury. And he adds that his selection prioritized those proposals linked to the current political context “to account for the state of the world, to connect with our recent history, to help us continue thinking about how we got here or to remind us of what the human experiences that we believe consist of. ” that are worth living .”