Page 215 - Únete. Join us (Bienal de Venecia, 57 edición)

APPARITIONS ThEATRE ANDREA VALDÉS
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Going into the bend I can feel my arms getting heavier. What did you expect?, I ask myself, since in Jordi Colomer’s works something always comes up: a race, a bonfire, a party. Or it might be people jumping into the water, walking against the wind, planting a flag in the middle of nothing and then sharing paella. If a text is ever mentioned, it tends to be programmatic, and here’s where Charles Fourier, Yonna Friedman, or the Situationists come in. I like it when they do this sideways, and it’s like an invitation to act or like the sort of recipe others will adapt and make their own by using what’s available in their pantries. This same impulse led me to devise the following parade, made up of different moments, and written in the midst of a film shooting where I ended up hugging a fake building, as an extra. These are situations based on real facts and actual spaces that crept into my head, at times in the form of a conversation. At other times they were like warnings, flashes, possibilities, or the kind of settings I’d like—but haven’t yet managed—to reach. They also came to me as riddles—and here I’m thinking of a town that spontaneously forms each year, made up of snowbirds fleeing the all-too-harsh winters.
I. A stone in your shoe
The said town is in Quartzsite, Arizona. I bet life over there is quite different from life in New York, Chicago, or San Francisco, where people easily fall into debt and may even think about Europe—that continent where you’re served coffee with a mean attitude and universities are under-appreciated. During the low season, Quartzsite has about 3,000 inhabitants, but beginning in October, something extraordinary occurs. People from all over come in their RVs. At first it was the climate that attracted them, as well as the inexpensive campgrounds in BLM land, but then over time that spot in the middle of the desert became a prime tourist enclave, and today it’s one of the ten most densely populated areas in the US—just for a few months each year. In March this townscape begins to melt away as people migrate back to wherever they came from, saying goodbye till next year.