Air performances at the MACBA
At the open rehearsal of Ocells perduts, Laia Estruch emulates the singing of birds as she moves her body suspended in a net.
The Meier building of the Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA) is hosting Notes for an Eye Fire until February 2022. It is the first exhibition of Panorama 21, a new series of transdisciplinary projects that delves into contemporary aesthetics and artistic practices. It is a collective show that brings together a group of recent productions and works specially commissioned in the fields of painting, sculpture, works with paper, video installations, performances, photography and textiles.
The title, which comes from a poem book by Gabriel Ventura written in 2020, evokes a powerful metaphor that invites us to question reality as we see it. It also encourages us to explore an expanded definition — or a circular gaze ± that involves the rest of our senses and gives rise to new ways of interpreting the world and producing knowledge. Among others, the works weave certain concerns through the subversion of spatial rules and perspectives between stage and audience, such as our relationship with non-human life.
In this context, Laia Estruch offers the possibility of attending the open rehearsals of the performance Ocells perduts, which is part of her trajectory to make audible contents that are not audible or to create new sounds through her voice. This time, the artist presents a series of bird songs and calls with the articulation of her voice as she moves above a scenography suspended from the ceiling created from the nets used to intercept birds during migration periods. The net acts as the stage, a sculpture, a windsock, and a score on which Estruch evolves and reproduces the songs she has been listening to and rehearsing during the spring and summer months in the places where birds, such as the turtle dove, the cuckoo and the scops owl, stop and nest in Barcelona.
The origin of Ocells perduts dates back to early 2020 when Estruch came across a Catalan translation of Stray Birds (1916), the Bengali writer Rabindranath Tagore's aphoristic poems, in a second-hand bookshop in Mexico City.
Access to the activity is free, but as seats are limited, registration through this link is required. Tickets will be available one week before each session.