Page 164 - Únete. Join us (Bienal de Venecia, 57 edición)

15 Markus Miessen:
Crossbenching: Toward Participation as Critical Spatial Practice, Berlin: Sternberg Press, p. 45.
16 Judith Butler, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2015, p. 23.
17 Charles Fourier: Le Nouveau Monde Industriel, Brussels: Librairie Belge- Française, 1840, p. 96.
elicit phonological, and not merely semantic awareness, in order to reinforce syntactic comprehension of utterances, and the unfolding of discourse in a not necessarily linear fashion. This dimension of the theatrical posits an unprecedented connection between object and subject: a re-arranged relationship is being staged.15 Or better yet, a relationship in the course of being rearranged, and thus, with as yet unforeseen effects.
Cinematic fictions
“What does it mean to act together when the conditions for acting together are devastated or falling away?”
— Judith Butler16
“Ha! ha! les groupes, c’est un sujet plaisant que les groupes : ça doit être amusant les groupes!”
— Charles Fourier17
Beginning with the piece titled Simo (1997), Colomer’s work shifted to audiovisual formats that reflected on the space of representation and the creation of fictional characters, in a hybrid type of installation he described as “a sculpture stretched across time”. Four years later he produced Le Dortoir (2001), which depicts – in a sequence shot that takes us from night-time to daytime across a complex stage set and through hand-made objects – a twelve-storey building where the characters, on the day after a party, sleep among the leftovers. Ever since then, Colomer decided to leave behind homely indoor settings to open the gates of the set where he filmed his works: His characters leave the closed stage set, hit the streets, and face the real city. And they are not alone in their sortie: they carry along their fictional world, in the form of objects, scale models, slogans, or letterings, as tokens of a language shaping the possibility of a new storytelling, turning their videos into narrative machines that open opportunities for dwelling poetically in the city.
In ¡Únete! Join Us!, the array of videos disseminated across the installations conveys micro-narratives sequentially joined into a sort of continuous summation taking place in different geographical locations. Every video presents a series of poetic gestures constituting an urban movement, an essentially collective exchange, a utopian fiction capable of affecting reality. Distributed across both circulation spaces and stopping points,
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¡ÚNETE! JOIN US! JORDI COLOMER