Una Flor y Mil Caminos
Elsgüer Studio - Mutante - House of Tupamaras
13-27 Octubre 2022
Celine Bureau
Montreal, Canadá
Curador : Santiago Tavera
A Flower and a Thousand Paths is an exploration of ethnographies of the “other” and alternative networks of communication. The exhibition brings together practices that navigate different identities, and new ways of constructing narratives, through the work of 3 Colombian artist collectives: House of Tupamaras and Mutante based in Bogota and Elsgüer Studio based in Montréal.
Elsgüer Studio presents 3Lix, which explores layered connections of femme bodies through
generational trauma. This project invites viewers to engage with a textile video performance being altered live by the wind being captured through an anemometer. Elsgüer’s other piece, Patterns of Plasticity, is a video installation presenting a series of images of neural activity, along with 3D scans and footage of flowers and pathways captured in Canada and Colombia. This project explores oral history and language as an extension of identity, by reconstructing a journey of recovery based on community support and neuro-plasticity. Mutante’s Queer Forms of Life and Bi0film.net, explore how independent and distributed communication networks are at the core of self-organized communities, such as bacteria, which communicate and collectively act. This project includes blueprints and a video about a parabolic WIFI umbrella antenna that can extend the signal range for a mobile phone. House of Tupamaras’ video installation, Failure is my Style, presents a utopic vision of queerness, while using broken text to question the self within structures of dissidence. This project celebrates empowerment through failure, adaptation, movement, and our connection with
others. A Flower and a Thousand Paths gives space to practices that are centered at the idea of community, collaboration, media experimentation, and postcolonial approaches to art making and presentation. As a video installation exhibition, A Flower and a Thousand Paths transforms Céline Bureau to present narratives of defiance and hope.
VIDEO OF THE EXHIBITION
VIDEO 360°
PROJECTS ON EXHIBITION
Bi0film.net
Natalia Rivera and Jung Hsu
Co-creation with Mutante
Bi0film.net, is an open project made by Jung Hsu and Natalia Rivera that praises bacterial resistance in contrast to the reductionist discourse of war. The collective took one of the Hong Kong social movement’s icons, the yellow umbrella, and adapted it based on an open resource created by Andrew McNeil, to be used as a parabolic WiFi antenna. Other than covering, hiding, and protecting the user, Bi0film.net helps them communicate. The umbrella can act as an antenna for a mini server, a repeater or a router, increasing the range, while building a nomadic network that accompanies the demonstration in the streets. Self-organizing, collaborating, and communicating in a decentralized and distributed way are some of the wonderful actions of the living to break through, and that is what “resist like bacteria” means. This project has recently received the Golden Nica of the 2022 Prix Ars Electronica in Interactive Art+.
Project by: Jung Hsu - Natalia Rivera
Co-creation with: Mutante - Juan Diego Rivera - Manuel Orellana - Carlos Acosta - Margarita González - Daniel Osorio - Ana Isabel Castrillón - Robert Schnüll - Medienhaus/ project
In dialogue with: Juan Manuel Anzola - Lulu Hsieh - Carlos Maldonado - ZKL I Lun Shih - Shung Fuwei
Video editing: Juan Diego Rivera
Shooting: Juan Diego Rivera - Leslie Chi - Chunli Wang
Models: Vais Yakarivuwan - Brian Chang
Script correction: Sandra Ramos
Based on Andrew Mcneil's tutorial:
"The Wifi Umbrella Ultra long range Wifi".
New Media Class - UDK Berlin - Prof. Jussi Ängeslevä - Luiz Zanotello
Queer Forms of Life:
Internet for Bacteria - Phage
Mutante
Furthermore, along with this project, a series of blueprints of the Queer Forms of Life: Internet for Bacteria - Phage project present a near-impossible mediating device for the symbiogenesis of a digital-bio hybrid organism between bacteria and the internet. A device to create a queer form of life, a hyperconnected bacteria superorganism. Internet for Bacteria is the exploration of the possibilities of our current digital communication technologies as interspecies/inter- living-entities mutual aid technologies.
Project by Natalia Rivera
Co-creation with Mutante
In dialogue with: Juan Diego Rivera, Carlos Acosta, Daniela Brill, Luis Williams-Fallas, Manuel Orellana, Margarita González, Jung Hsu, Carlos Maldonado, Juan Felipe Zapata, Juan Manuel Anzola, Dayana Calderón, Christian Romero, Ma. Fernanda Quinceno, Jeisson Triana, Iliana Hernández, Raúl Niño, Tatiana Avendaño, María Cecilia Medina, Gumercindo Rivera, Sandra Ramos, Takuya Koyama. Queer forms of life (Formas extrañas de vida) creation group [Suratómica], Microcosmos creation group [Suratómica], Other [Tiny] forms of life (Otras [perqueñas] formas de vida) creation
groups. CorpoGen Laboratory. New Media Class UDK WS2020-SS22.
Patterns of Plasticity
Elsgüer Studio
Patterns of Plasticity is an installation that presents a series of 3D animations of flowers constantly blooming from each other, superimposed onto a series of images of neural activity, and walking pathways from Colombia and Canada. This project invites viewers to journey through sequences, paths and different networks of images and sounds that are constantly changing, as a metaphor for the magical process of neuro-plasticity. This collaborative and ongoing creative-research project proposes a deconstructed narrative through collaged memories, videos, texts and sound, and is inspired by the strength and resilience of one of the artist’s family members who is going through a process of rediscovery and plasticity, following brain damage that had an impact on language and communication. Santiago Tavera practice revolves around constructing immersive and interactive projects that expand the body and perception through digital media to evoke virtual simulations of migrant and queer narratives of dislocation. In Tavera’s work, mixed media compositions of videos, 3D graphic animations, text, sound and architectural elements create blurred experiences of physical and virtual spatial embodiments of the “other”.
Concept and Direction: Santiago Tavera
Collaborator and 3D programmer: Milton Riaño
Sound Designer: AM Devito
Consultant: Crystal Branco- Speech Pathologist
Voices: Carmen Rosa Munoz, Diana Velasquez, Adriana Velasquez,
Jennifer Tavera, Abigail Ortiz and Olivia Ortiz.
Special Thanks: Norma Velasquez, The Canada Council for the Arts & Mobility Group Colombia
3Lix
Elsgüer Studio
3Lix is a video performance installation that combines choreography, textile work, digital intervention and wind sensor data to create a polymorphic scene. As the end of the world approaches and we have still not defined why we are here in the first place, this work reflects on how we were never meant to be a singular form but rather vessels of transformation in continuous movement. Layered consciousness in one body. Fragmented, multiple, simultaneous and in flux. Beautiful, angry, connected, disconnected. At once re-enacting and healing our generational trauma.
In this installation, 3 bodies in movement are present simultaneously to create one composite image: a dancer wearing a textile piece in a video, the wind at the site which speed is measured through a sensor that is programmed to alter the video image of the dancer in real time, and the viewer who experiences the piece and sees themselves reflected in it through an installation of mirrors. Through this network of moving forms, 3Lix poetically inquires about the patterns within patterns from which emerges our lived experience and sense of identity.
Laura Acosta is a Colombian-Canadian transdisciplinary artist interested in observing how different bodies accept or reject the structures they dwell within, and the effects this can take on the surrounding environment. She creates audio-visual compositions that integrate textile structures, costuming, performance and some multimedia elements, as a way to explore themes of identity and dislocation. Through surreal imagery, Acosta looks to ask the audience to allow their subjectivity to come to the forefront and create new meanings. The core of Laura’s artistic practice is collaboration in order to create layered works that combine disciplines and produce new aesthetic languages.
Credits
Concept + Direction: Laura Acosta
Assistant director + Dramaturgy: Augustin Rodriguez Beltran
Assistant director + Consultation: Santiago Tavera
Videography: Stacy Lee
Video Editing: Santiago Tamayo
Performance: Daniela Carmona
Sensor programing: Milton Riaño
El Fracaso es mi Estilo
House of Tupamaras
Failure is my Style is born from an attempt to rediscover oneself in the place of contradictions, to discover the faggot body and dissidence as spaces not exempt from impossible aspirations such as success. Indeed, if you are to be a dissident, it seems forbidden to err or fail. Is it a failure for dissidence to cry for love? The artwork is a process of collective writing where theft, mending, weaving and unweaving are presented as ways of approaching the word, identity and its implications that asks can we write ourselves away from all absolute truth? Can we fail every day better?
Credits
Direction: Alejandro Penagos and HunterTexas
Camera and Editing: Arkhe
Music: CVM GWIRL
Voice: Agnes Brekke
Costume Designer: Alejandro Serrano
H.O.T Crew: Baretamara, Cobra, Pooh Tamara, Honey Vergony, Laila
Tamara, Ponny Tamara, Lady Hunter and Roxxy Tamara
Commissioned by 100 Ways to Say We project, in cooperation with the
Goethe-Institut.
INTERVIEWS
Mutante
Together with Jung Hsu
House of Tupamaras
Elsgüer Studio
ARTICLE IN VIE DES ARTS
"Willful ambivalence in A Flower and a Thousand Paths"
by Marcela Bórquez
_______
Thank you, Santiago Tavera and Celine Bureau, for the invitation!
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