Page 183 - Únete. Join us (Bienal de Venecia, 57 edición)

CONSTRUCTION WIThOUT END MANUEL CIRAUQUI 183
At some unspecified location, a small crowd manipulates elements of a stage set, transforming the place where it is, or it is to be, installed. The duration of the action matches that of Jordi Colomer’s 2015 work X-Ville. It is a multiple action, as plural as the agents involved, all of whom are characters in a hypothetical city that is as ever-shifting as any city. X-Ville’s starting point is to be found in excerpts from a series of texts by the architect Yona Friedman, where utopia and urban space as its suitable framework are discussed.1 Although up to a point X-Ville may be construed as a free staging of those excerpts (their dramatic and cinematic translation), viewers are soon overwhelmed by the behavior of this unknown-city where cardboard and wood represent iron and concrete, and fruit and vegetables represent vegetables and fruit, and “real” currency is exchanged for cards made of the same cardboard as the buildings. The reductivist scenery drives the characters’ behavior into a level of circularity and gestural abstraction that soon questions the nature of the action itself. This evokes, like dreams in a huge hangover, disparate genres and theatrical forms from the last century of Western Modernity: documentary drama in Weimar Germany; Ballet Mécanique; slapstick comedy in silent films; improvisation theatre, street theatre; the Theatre of the Absurd; crowd happenings; the cinematic agit-prop; and even certain types of circus acts. References, therefore, go far beyond the textual, and the work’s singularity lies in their overall synthesis.
1 Yona Friedman, Utopies réalisables (1974). Paris & Tel-Aviv: L’Éclat, 2000; and “Où commence la ville”, in Manuels Vol. 1, 1975-1984, Poitou: CNEAI, 2007.