Ainara Lopez
Switzerland
Ainara is a Spanish dancer, choreographer, translator/interpreter and collage artist. She creates multi-disciplinary and socially engaging performances for improbable spaces. Her work is often site-specific, inspired by the unpredictable, rituals and DADA. She cofounded the multi-disciplinary art collective L'Atelier D in Tunisia-Denmark, and Sangria Discreta and La Cie deTASoeur in Switzerland. She is also one of the founders of the Moonwalk Project in 2016.
www.laciedetasoeur.com
www.moonwalkexperience.wixsite.com/moonwalk
www.lasangriadiscreta.webnode.es
www.makalilo.com
Response to the question:
“CARTOGRAFIAS DEL RECUERDO #1//THE SUSPENDED MEMORY”
1. CARTOGRAFIAS DEL RECUERDO
BLANK+ THE WANDERING+ THE CITY
INDIVIDUAL MEMORY+SHARED MEMORIES DISPOSITIF// THE SUSPENDED
MEMORY
1. CARTOGRAFIAS DEL RECUERDO is about ITINERANCE
and
atlas fragments
maps of memory
manipulation and constructions
beginnings
and ends
Inspired by Judith Schalansky's Atlas of Remote Islands, Italo Calvino's Invisible cities, and the Moonwalk Project, I wanted to travel 7 ports collecting the memories of the cities and its inhabitants and trying to find my own memory out of borrowing other people's souvenirs.
Memory chooses moments linked to spaces, to desire, to pain, to absence... It introduces questions about time, temporality and the organisation of the visible and the invisible. Memory is a trace that can be questioned. What remains of the past? What disappears? It changes, transforms, adapts. It is a state of consciousness. Memory changes memories. Maps are as subjective as memory. They reflect different visions of a reality. Subjective representations that give an understanding of space.
2. Blank.
Wandering is a repeated, prolonged and uncontrolled behaviour, characterised by incessant walking, with or without a purpose. Blank. The person can walk around at any time of the day or night and for several hours. Blank. THE PERSON SHOULD NOT BE PREVENTED FROM WANDERING.
I am a white canvas, an empty surface where everything can be written.
I do wander around following different protocols and devices. I do wander alone, sometimes I wander with others. At day, at night, meeting improbable situations and places, collecting things that might help me remember. Maybe.
I am the wanderer, I am the collective memory, the mirror. I am the one who does not follow a linear time. I am the one to hold and carry the ancestral remembering, inside my spine, in the water of my cells and their designs.
Taking one's time is an act of subversion in a society which highlights and idolise speed. Walking is an act of resistance. Slowness, availability, silence, curiosity, values that are opposed to the new-liberal sensibilities that condition our lives nowadays.
Cities , like dreams, are made of desire and fears.
Even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules absurd, their perspectives cheating and everything hides another. Italo Calvino
Naples is a RAW city. It is a good terrain de jeux. The city is a space that is both known and foreign. It is memory and forgetting.
3. I wandered. I started collecting random objects, one object per day. First as souvenirs, later as pieces of material I could hang to dry from a balcony. I drew maps, emotional maps, desire cartographies, the parcours of my wanderings, I chose the way these maps should be presented, through my own filters.
Do I remember or do I become someone else by incorporating these souvenirs?
What to do with someone else's memories? How can I connect them to my own? Are they not a little bit mine as well ?
Is it not the memory of the city already mine? Am I not myself somehow the city?
Following the cloth-lines as they ran from one balcony to another.
An ordinary act linked to landscape and memory.
I built and installation inspired on theses cloth-lines and while doing it, my own childhood memories started to arise.
And I hanged them
And I hanged myself
And I fell
And hanged myself again
and listened to all songs I could think about and called my grandmother amona
and danced and hanged myself again memories arising, I wrote them,
one by one
fragments, suspended memories
hanging to dry
and then people came in and they looked and thought about their past
carefully selected, extracted their own fragments
and were invited to suspend them
You're walking.
And you don't always realise it
But you're always falling
With each step, you fall forward slightly
And then catch yourself from falling
Over and over, you're falling
And then catching yourself from falling
And this is how you can be walking and falling
At the same time
L. Anderson// Walking and falling
