Beyond Performance
Until July 14, at Palazzo Strozzi, the site-specific works of artists Cally Spooner, Mario García Torres and the Opavivará collective
From April 12 to July 14, 2019 Palazzo Strozzi presents Beyond Performance, a special project that includes site-specific interventions by artists Cally Spooner and Mario García Torres and the Opavivará collective: three ways of reworking the idea of performance in today's artistic production as interdisciplinary expressive form and experimentation between different contexts and the fundamental involvement of the public.
From 12 April to 12 May 2019 the Strozzina spaces host the works of Cally Spooner and Mario García Torres.
Famous for his ability to combine space, performance and writing, Cally Spooner presents And You Were Wonderful, On Stage ("And you were wonderful, on stage"), a video installation that comes from the homonymous 2013 musical work by the artist as a live performance in numerous museums and international exhibition spaces. With a metanarrative approach, the work shows the construction of a film based on the musical, in an emotional and conceptual immersion for the audience that finds itself at the center of five great projections. The music runs on images shot live, in which various actions of actors and performers are followed in a continuous rotation between stage and backstage, creating a strong tension for the visitors constantly placed inside and outside the show. The protagonist is a female choir that transforms into notes the notes of a meeting of an advertising agency which discusses how to transform personal facts into potential commercials for the company. Citing also pop culture figures like Beyoncé and Justin Bieber or politicians like Michael Gove and Jon Favreau, the text and the installation become an ironic reflection on how the use of media, technologies or media can hide, manipulate or transform the reality.
Mario García Torres proposes Falling Together in Time, an installation in which video, painting, music, sculpture and performance interact to create a series of references and connections by transfiguring the exhibition space in an inspired setting to a concert arena. The title is taken from one of the videos presented in the exhibition: starting from Los Angeles in the early 1980s, chronicle stories and stories of popular and musical culture are intertwined and linked together through a series of random connections between time, space and pop culture.
From 16 May to 14 July 2019 the courtyard of Palazzo Strozzi hosts the Opavivará installation.
As an ideal conclusion to the project, the Opavivarà collective (Brazil 2005) transforms the courtyard of Palazzo Strozzi into a large space of participation and involvement through the Rede Social installation, a large and colorful hammock over 10 meters in which the public will be invited to go up to experience the space and architecture of the building in a totally new, unconventional way and without hierarchies.
