BEING FORMLESS LIKE WATER

 

This text was published in ETOPIA.ES

you can read it in full by clicking here

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PASE was born as an invitation from the Laboratorio de Danza y Nuevos Medios to make a choreographic journey linking La Aljafería with Etopía, crossing the empty lot, the wasteland that separates them. A choreographic route is a proposal that focuses on the trajectories and flows of bodies as they move from one place to another. It observes the “paths of desire” or paths of necessity, which are those paths that are made with the footsteps of bodies and proposes certain looks to rediscover gaps and unconnected, lost or forgotten stories. It is on the basis of the bodies, of their movement, of their transit that a narrative is constructed or proposed, based on a work of documentation of the place as well as an experience and observation. Starting from a lack of knowledge of the place, they seek points of fracture from which to activate the spaces. In this case, the invitation was to make a sound tour.

To work on the sound and accompany the process, María del Castillo was invited, and in a sort of blind date we got together to work. During the days of the residency until the beginning of the state of alarm, we carried out interviews and sound recordings, trying to uncover the multiple stories of an apparently forgotten place, and touring the wasteland, the Paseo del Agua, without water. During this time we talked to various people who told us how the future looked back then, the future that was today, the successes, the failures and the unexpected, what came that they could not foresee. We asked them what that walk would be like today. We reinvented the walk. We reinvented a dystopian present. A watery walk along the paths of desire traced byt he movementof the bodies.

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The empty lot is one of those fracture points, a crack that marks and delimits a border in the city. It is a characteristic of the wasteland, it belongs to the periphery. This fracture also generates a delimitation in spatial perception, that which is beyond it is conceived as distant and for the body that walks there is a mental effort. On the other side of this border or fracture is Etopia. You don't go to Etopia unless there is something concrete to do there. We attract them with bestsellers, Juan would say later. Before I knew anything about the place I wondered what that building was doing there, on the other side of the border, which was also called that, Etopia. Suddenly a place where apparently there is nothing began to fill with stories, fragments of stories that sometimes contradicted each other. With every walk, and every interview, a new layer appeared. From interview to interview we carried out a work of recent historiography, a detective work of an apparently meaningless place.

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ESTHER RODRIGUEZ-BARBERO

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