2024-05-05 04:51:25
Analía Couceyro and Sofía Gala Castiglione They had already worked together in The wisdom –movie Eduardo Pinto released in 2019– and also in the series 23 pares created by Marta Dillon and Albertina Carri, broadcast in 2012 on Channel 9. However, they had never shared the stage. Today they meet in the Cunill Cabanellas room What’s great about being me? Theory about the beda collective and transdisciplinary creation of the director Julieta Ascar, the artist and performer Zoe Di Rienzo and the writer Liliana Viola.
A woman makes a radical decision: not to leave her bed. He does it as a form of resistance in a context of urgency or perhaps as a performative gesture to attract curious people. They try to diagnose it but no one can find the nail on the head. Zoe Di Rienzo, artist and performer, develops live a theory about life in a horizontal position and revisits the history of her ancestor Zoe Rencini, who in the 17th century (in the midst of the bubonic plague) carried out a revolution without leaving bed. Analía Couceyro and Sofía Gala Castiglione embody the dreams, thoughts and contradictions of the protagonist.
When asked what the first reading of the material was like, Couceyro remembers: “It was great. When they called me, the text was not yet finished but I blindly trusted the team, which was what led me to want to be part of it. She had worked with Juli on a performance and had once done something with texts from Lili, with whom we are also friends. And I really wanted to work with Sofi in theater.” The actress defines the material as “new and contemporary” and she celebrates the multiplicity of languages, something that particularly interests her: “Here the performative coexists with the world of visuals, theater, video, and live music.”
Gala Castiglione, for her part, says that Liliana Viola called her: “She is a very good friend of mine, I love her very much and we have a very strange connection because we have our birthday on the same day and I feel that we have something very similar. We had worked together on two occasions and I must say that even before reading the text, because of his idea and her proposal, I was already in.” The actress remembers the first reading as a quite peculiar moment: “Our magician Liliana summoned us all to do the famous first reading and she read everything herself. She somehow released her work there, with us. It seemed like a super original idea and I was moved to hear it. The other day mom came to see a dress rehearsal and she told me: ‘I can tell you like what you’re saying.’ There is a strength when you feel close to the material, when they are things that you want to say or that you think are important to say.”
–The bed is the great symbol of this work. It is said to be “the most metaphysical furniture in the house, where everything begins and ends” and there are several references. How did they become linked to that element?
Analía Couceyro: –In the work there are pictorial, cinematographic, and photographic references. The bed is something that is very present on a visual level in the collective imagination. In my case, since I read a lot, some literary links came to mind: a beautiful poem by Sylvia Plath (The book of beds), a very nice book by Annie Ernaux with a photographer (The use of the photo, along with Marc Marie) that portrays several beds and in each photo there is a description of how everything looks after a night of love. And in the book that I wrote (The right agetogether with Valeria Sestua) there is also a text about beds.
Sofia Gala Castiglione: –There was no need to look for too many references because The bed is a place that we all inhabit. I love it and it works like a kind of bunker in my house.: a refuge within the refuge, a place where I can be alone and have my personal space. If I can stay in bed for a whole day, great. It is a space that I love to inhabit. The beauty of the bed is that: it is nothing magnificent or extraordinary but something very common, we can all identify with it.
–From certain capitalist readings, guilt appears for staying in bed, for that alleged inaction, right?
S.G.C.: –Yes, it is interesting what is raised in the work about this supposed inaction. For me there is no such thing. From the capitalist concept it is defined whether we are productive or not, then the bed represents leisure. The free time that one gives oneself is super productive, important and necessary time because it is a time in which you are not responding to any obligation. Look at what the concept of leisure will mean socially: if you are not working, raising your children or doing something in productive terms, it seems that you are not doing anything.
–There is another reading that links this to artists and it is an interesting moment to think about that, ¿no? Productive time and leisure time in culture.
A.C.: –I think there is something about hyperproductivity, that need to be producing all the time, which is getting worse and has to do with the times beyond our disciplines. And there is something about the political scenario that also changed: it is a moment in which artists have to explain what we work for. It seemed like people loved their artists and admired them, but suddenly we are lazy and steal all the money. In this political context there is also something that is expected of artists. Leisure, art and creativity are topics that are being thought about. There are times when one is searching without producing an object, which is why processes are important. It seems to me that there is something political in thinking of art as a product, that is what is happening today since the current drop in line.
–The need appeared to explain the nature of artistic work to revalue it by virtue of its processes and not only as a product. How do they get along with that?
S.G.C.: –In my case, I never think that I have to revalue art, for me it is a value. At least from my place, I don’t feel like I have to take charge of anything in that sense. For me art is super valuable, it opens minds and reaches a lot of places; It is a way of communicating, a very clear and universal language. What is happening is so fast and so violent that in these times I feel grateful and lucky to be able to be doing theater, resisting with my colleagues in a room, talking about something that raises questions for me. That is one of the great values of art: asking questions. I am not even responsible for anyone’s devaluation of what is so important to me.; It is not only my vocation and my job but something that I love.
A.C.: -Yeah, It is a refuge always and now more. On the other hand, there is something productive and money that is always in the middle. Today money occupies an obscene place: all the time we are talking about money, there is a super violent discourse that maintains that what is valuable is what is worth money and it seems to me that art runs away from that, even when it later becomes a object of consumption. That is never what first moves you to do a work. In some cases it must be like this, of course, but it is not the most common. Today we have to defend spaces of resistance more than ever. I do take charge of this speech that says “art is a thing for lazy people.” For me there are a lot of people who are very asleep and art wakes up, so we have to be attentive as the work says.
The text explores some issues typical of the 17th century but are still current. Many men died with the bubonic plague and, for the first time in history, women were allowed to dispose of their land, run businesses and freely decide who to marry. “The question would be why progress was not made in that direction. Today we should already be on the moon of harmony, peace and equality (…) We believed that it was already… That with this incredible advance, the rules established by fire were going to melt. But these monsters are extremely tenacious and reassert themselves where they are not dismantled again and again,” writes Viola. “This is a moment in which we cannot rest on what we achieved in any branch because reality hit us hard,” says Couceyro, and her partner agrees: “Yes, I think this devaluation is registered in what is said about art but also in a certain type of art that is increasingly presented from the mainstream: everything flat, cold, superficial, politically correct. “It doesn’t seem like a coincidence to me.”
In How magnificent…? An interesting reflection appears on feminisms based on the representation of women in the art world or Zoe Rencini’s own history. “The woman IS in a horizontal position,” writes Viola. “I think there is something very interesting in these anonymous women in history and in these revolutions that they faced, like those who rebelled and decided not to be mothers in the 17th century. Zoe makes the decision not to get out of bed anymore, she does not fulfill what was expected of her. History was written by men and women were always punished, burned, set on fire.”says Sofia. And Analía adds: “The feminine imagination always ends up being masculine because it is formatted by men’s views on what a woman should be like, how she is visually represented, what is expected of her, what she can produce and what she cannot.”
The work includes multiple references: cinematographic (such as Sleep by Andy Warhol, that feature film of more than 5 hours where the artist records the dream of his lover John Giorno), pictorial (several portraits of lying women that become “still lifes”), literary (the crude original version of the story by Sleeping Beauty or the letters written by Zoe) and others linked to contemporary art (such as Tracey Emin’s controversial installation entitled My bedwhich was exhibited at the Tate Gallery in 1999 and generated several controversies).
The actresses assure that the disciplinary intersections of the work enable a great space of freedom and, far from becoming a formal corset, they invite you to play and have fun through the performance. When asked about the medical perspective that emerges in relation to the bed – the work contemplates diagnoses such as depression, bipolarity or schizophrenia – Couceyro associates it with that obligation of having to permanently label: “That is very current and very theatrical. . In the performing arts and in life it happens all the time, you need to label to define and it is always uncomfortable what is in the middle, what cannot be defined with certainty. But to act, the most interesting thing is always that which is in the middle.”
–As the bed is such a private space, this show now premieres in a public theater room. How do you think about the public in times when its role is also questioned?
A.C.: –It is a tragic moment. There is no doubt that the public sector is absolutely emptied and impoverished, but also discredited under the idea that it is an expense. For me it is an obligation of the State to produce art and these theaters are training spaces for many generations: in some way, our heads are formatted by all the works we saw here. In my case, for example, I remember Galileo Galilei (the legendary version of Bertolt Brecht directed by Jaime Kogan and starring Walter Santa Ana which premiered at the Martín Coronado theater in 1984), among many others. It is not something banal or decorative; it’s food. So it is super lying and violent to pose this dilemma between food and art.
S.G.C.: –Yes, and it is very classist to believe that you only need to eat. It seems super classist to me because in the most remote places in the universe there is art: a kid is singing on a ranch, in Africa they are playing drums while still hungry, here around the corner the same thing happens. There are a lot of artists and musical genres, for example, that emerge from the most humble places. The belief that everything is entertainment is a mistake. I think that is the danger of the superficialization of art. When we talk about the public we have to consider that in spaces like the San Martín Theater the entrance is super accessible and perhaps someone can come with their entire family. In another theater on this same street it may be impossible to pay for a single ticket.
*What’s great about being me? It can be seen from Wednesday to Sunday at 7:30 p.m. in the Cunill Cabanellas room of the San Martín Theater (Av. Corrientes 1530).