Part of COMMA40.
The Spanish word 'bitácora' comes from the Latin 'habitaculum', which means little dwelling, and it is equivalent to the English nautical term 'binnacle' (a case on the deck of a ship where delicate navigational instrumentation is housed). The bitácora's book is the ship's log book, so named because it was kept inside the binnacle. It was here that the captain registered all the events and measures taken during a ship's voyage.
Eva's choreographic experiment will turn Bloomberg SPACE into a bitácora, where not only the book is kept, but where the events logged in the book take place, with Ospina painting on the gallery walls to record the proceedings.
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| Photography by Lola Maury |
PRESS
"A floorplan of the gallery is painted large on the wall beside him [Alejandro Ospina] and as time passes he spins a network of words, lines, shapes and images over it. Black, blue, yellow, fluorescent, up and down on an indoor cherry-picker. Hilaire Belloc's children’s poemMatilda is inscribed on the wall. The story of the girl who cried fire, it's a moral tale with a charred ending. The more Ospina paints the more the story becomes obscured, and the more hours that pass in which Recacha fills the gallery with her relentless energy, the less she becomes a representation of this fated girl Matilda and the more she becomes her own, obsessive, lonely and captivating creature.
Some of my personal favourite moments watching the piece were those when Recacha chose to recite multiplication times tables. Sometimes chanting like a stubborn child, sometimes whispering like a prayer and sometimes struggling to scream like a trapped animal. Childhood, obedience, entrapment and rules – all these things are conjured up and the structure of the numbers somehow echoes the rhythm of Matilda and Ospina’s methodical charting of the events.
'I think I felt like a child because [the gallery] didn’t fit my size. I don’t know how, but for seven hours I’m going to fill it with my presence. It’s not a human scale; it’s made for big works of art, not for a human being to be portrayed there.' Recacha seized the challenge and it seems to have worked."
Eleanor Sikorski, The Place's Comma40 blog
PERFORMANCES
27 November 2011, 11am-6pm Bloomberg SPACE, London
30 June 2012, 11pm-2am, Noche en Blanco, Solar Calle Santiago, Zaragoza
Choreographer/Performer: Eva Recacha
Visual Artist: Alejandro Ospina: Homepage, IMT Gallery page
Advisor: Lola Maury
