11th-14th FEB 2019

When: 11th-14th February 2019 | 10am-3pm

Where: Aula 1 CaixaForum Madrid (Pº del Prado, nº 36, 28014, de Madrid)

Duration: 4 days

Nº people: max. 15 students

Price: 30€

If any doubts, write to art@art-madrid.com

The workshop is aimed at creators of the field of visual arts with great willingness to experiment.

For these activities program of Art Madrid we have invited two Spanish creators with a large background working together. Elena Córdoba, one of the main choreographers and dancers, who shares this workshop with the audiovisual creator David Benito. Both invite us to enter the world the site-specific creation to work with their two major fields: body and space.

58 ways of looking at the body

“A body is long, tall, wide, deep: all that in more or less large size, a body is extensive. It touches each side to other bodies. A body is corpulent even when it is thin.”

“The body is material. It is separate. Different from the other bodies. A body begins and ends against another body. Even emptiness is a very subtle kind of body.”

From Fifty-eight Indices on the Body (Corpus), Jean-Luc Nancy

The etymology of the verb “to look” in Romanic languages leads us to the Latin verb mirare: to admire, to contemplate with interest and pleasure something of extraordinary qualities.

We propose an anatomical look at the corpulence of the body, at its long, wide, high and deep being. A look that leans on the details of the body to admire them as if they were extraordinary qualities of matter. The skin, breathing, phonation, sweat, hair, elbows, will be the subjects of our gaze.

Let's try to think that the body, as a whole or as a unit, does not exist, that the only way we can know our corporality is the look (distant and strange) of a camera that focuses on each organ, on each detail of the body, as if it were an unknown space that we could re-meaning.

What would we find through that segmented gaze? A landscape? A cave? A volcano? An eye? The movement?

SPEAKERS

David Benito (Madrid, 1979) studied Art History and Fine Arts, and a Master's Degree in Art and Creation Research at the Fine Arts School of the Complutense University of Madrid, where he has been a collaborator of the Department of Drawing and Image Arts in the Photography area. He works in theatre since he became technical head of the theatre-room "El canto de la cabra" in 2006. Since then, he works as a lighting designer with several companies in Madrid, as a technical coordinator for companies and festivals, and he has managed to mix all this with the visual arts in his work with the choreographer Elena Córdoba.

Elena Córdoba (Madrid, 1961), is a dancer and choreographer. Her work is based on the detailed observation of the body, axis and subject of her work. Years ago, she began “Poetic Anatomy”, a cycle of creation on the inside of the body, linked to the study of medical anatomy. She is especially attracted to the study of the physical and social foundations of the act of dancing. In parallel to her work as a choreographer and pedagogue, she has encouraged the creation of collective projects for research around the body and its movement.