Loading…

The ways of language await for us outside

Get more details
  • 0
01 02 03      

Hopscotch | Tribute to the night | Juillet 1976

Monday, 03 March 2014 09:40 Written by Katnira Bello

Hopscotch Katnira Bello.

This piece was carried out in Parque Juárez. I used the whole park to draw a hopscotch that would be impossible, because the imaginary jumps were over ten meters apart. I drew the horizontal blocks composing the hopscotch in opposite order, as I walked around the location and spoke to the visitors and vendors. Every line – and imaginary jump – of the game corresponded to a brief five- to ten-minute action that worked as an independent piece. The total performance lasted two and a half hours. The  aim was to finish back at the beginning, leaving the number 1 and its "square" (four pink flower-buds) ready to be used.

Tribute to the night
Katnira Bello.

This was a 25-hour performance on the Night, darkness and the long Arctic polar night when the sun disappears for three weeks. I interviewed children, old people and workers from a window factory on this subject. The interviews, the sound of the wind, my footsteps in the snow and the faraway bark of the dogs became the soundtrack to my action. In the piece I did what I normally do at night: write, play cards, chat, meet new people, dance, dream, have nightmares, desire and play. I wrote down the experiences I had during the residency and asked the people who visited me to write some thoughts about the moon in their own language. The end result is a  six-meter-long text in English, Spanish, Swedish, Italian, German, French and Finnish. I chatted and danced with the people who visited me. During several moments of the action, I wear an elk mask and carry out rituals surrounding the elk, the spirit of the forest, and its relationship with the dreams that I had during my stay. The rest of the action became an installation that one could explore.

Juillet 1976 Katnira Bello.

In 2000, with the support of the Young Creators' Grant (FONCA), I carried out the series “Juillet 1976” using as a starting point an issue of PHOTO magazine  from July 1976 (the year I was born), a special edition with photographers studying eroticism. A few friends accepted to help me as models in a fairly abstract photographic project involving male nudes. In the session before the shoot I casually showed them the magazine, and asked them  - without any apparent reason - to point out the three photographs that they found the most sensual. Once they had chosen them, I explained that the nude project in which they had agreed to take part consisted of me reinterpreting the photos that they had selected, with them as models. In this way, the series did not involve remaking photos, but using them as starting points then adapting them to my own imagination, reinterpreting them.

Read 3036 times Last modified on Monday, 03 March 2014 09:54