Page 165 - Únete. Join us (Bienal de Venecia, 57 edición)

they are organised into sequences depicting group actions led by women.18 As is common in Colomer’s prior works, the performances depicted in the videos are carried out by non-actors, playing themselves on screen. The sequences have been directed by actress Laura Weissmahr, writer and singer Lydia Lunch, and dancer and bank clerk Anita Deb – all of whose gestures are forms of resistance to the inertia of the everyday. The videos’ travelling, migrating, wandering, hustling narratology emerges from disparate production contexts: Nashville, Tennessee in the USA, Athens in Greece, and Barcelona and other areas in Catalonia. This anchoring in local vernacular traditions as well as in the displacements within them mirrors the same patterns of difference and repetition structuring the Pavilion’s spaces.
Laura
The first video begins with Laura Weissmahr on a donkey, being led by a guide, alongside a group of people riding different vehicles on wheels: carts, bicycles, caravans, etc. This whirlpool of bodies and moving hardware is visually orchestrated into a readable chromatic pattern by means of a series of green uniforms with stripes of unidentifiable colours, somehow reminiscent of Pierre Cardin’s 1980s futuristic geometric designs, to which are added a series of plastic objects in colourful tones, a heap of containers, and storage materials, all comprising a singular palette. All the various objects, containers, and mobile contraptions signal displacements, tropes of continuous movement, and the possibility of being anywhere. Although the filming took place in the Ampurdán region in Catalonia, the scene’s singularity lies in its ordinariness.
The fact that the protagonist is riding a donkey is highly iconic: Like a sort of migrant Virgin Mary, she is endowed with a weird mythical authority amidst the vulgarity of the scene. Two actions capture our attention in this sequence where the narrative is focalised through Laura. Firstly, the mobile pavilion contraption becomes an improvised stage where she relates the first part of Kafka’s “Das Stadtwappen” – a story on the construction of the Tower of Babel19 – before a gathering of attentive, expectant people. In Kafka’s narrative, the building of the Tower involves the construction of a city for the workmen, which in turn requires so much labour that work on the monument stalls for the sake of
18 “Utopia has been Euclidean, it has been European, and it has been masculine.” Ursula K. Le Guin, “ A Non-Euclidean View of California as a Cold Place to Be”, in Dancing at the Edge
of the World, London: Gollancz, 1989, p. 88.
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19 In 2009 Jordi Colomer created a blog where he compiled all the different translations of Kafka’s “Das Stadtwappen“ (“The City Coat of Arms“) into different languages (and images). http:// fuegogratisjordicolomer.blogspot. com.es/ [26 March 2017, 19:14].