Not Yet, Still
Probationary Stage Practice with Paz Rojo
Across the months of October and November 2023, the artistic investigation Not Yet, Still will be developed inside the Museo Reina Sofía. The project by artist and researcher Paz Rojo is articulated via two laboratories, an encounter, a stage experiment and a conversation, research that is part of Rojo’s broader project Morir Bien (Die Well), which draws inspiration from contemporary materialism and ecological thought to explore the encounter with declining historicity in the present time by way of the relationship between dance, the unknown and aesthetic experience. de la historicidad de la época actual, a través de la relación entre la danza, lo desconocido y la experiencia estética.
In the current context, besieged by crisis thinking and successive forms of epistemic violence, Not Yet, Still seeks to explore the dismantling of our time from the conceptual figure of ruin. What senses are opened before the presence of a time, a body and a stage on the verge of falling? Through ruin, we can delve deeper into the aesthetic scope of a time which, catastrophically and tragically, does not belong to us. As temporal and material figuration, ruin dissolves time for us, allowing us to start after the end: to listen to the remains, to what is left in spite of it all. Through ruin we let ourselves fall and contribute to the demolition of narratives and paradigms which weave our era; we open ourselves to the time of everything we are not and situate ourselves on a post-contemporary stage, ultimately experiencing an encounter with the aesthetics of a strange and immensely open time: a time which has, at the same time, a future and spectral quality.
Morir Bien Morir Bien is a project funded by Madrid City Council’s grants for contemporary creation. With the support of the residencies programme Notar, promoted by the MAR Platform (Museo Reina Sofía, hablarenarte and Fundación Daniel and Nina Carasso, Madrid); Radicantes (IVAM, Valencia); Festival Citemor (Portugal); Live Arts Laboratory, Tenerife Lab (Tenerife); the Los Barros Centre of Artists’ Residencies (Madrid) and the Notes for a Time Apart programme (Museo Reina Sofía).
Participants
Federico Campagna is a philosopher, and the author of The Last Night (Zero Books, 2013), Technic and Magic: The Reconstruction of Reality (Bloomsbury, 2018) and Prophetic Culture: Recreation for Adolescents (Bloomsbury Academic, 2021). He is an associate fellow of the Warburg Institute (London), a critical fellow of Royal Academy Schools (London) and a lecturer in Intellectual History at ECAL (Lausana), as well as the host of the literary podcast Overmorrow's Library, produced by the Centre d'Art Contemporain Genève. Furthermore, he works as a rights director at the UK/US radical publisher Verso Books and is the co-founder of the Italian philosophy publisher Timeo.
Paulina Chamorro works in the field of performing arts as a producer, performer and programme co-ordinator for theatres and institutions in Chile and Spain. Since 2009, she has worked independently and in collaborative pieces-projects which explore the creation of sensitive knowledge through experimental stage formats, with a particular interest in the relationship between representation, capitalism, expanded stage practices and post-modernism. Notable among her works are Ser Paisaje (NAVE, Santiago de Chile, 2021), Exuberante Hueco Hacer Lugar (Bosque Real, Madrid, 2022), VAHO (The Online Platform of Ongoing Research, 2022) and Una vibración casi imperceptible (CA2M, Móstoles, 2023).
Javier Cruz is an artist who develops his work through collaborative projects, both in his individual practice and as part of collective structures such as Elgatoconmoscas and PLAYdramaturgia. He also works with performing arts professionals, normally as a performer. Alongside Jacobo Cayetano (Zuloark), he created Bosque Real, a platform to safeguard forgotten heritage and to once again narrate it from multiple perspectives of retrieval. Moreover, with Fernando Gandasegui, he runs Bar Yola, an intersection between live art and pedagogies. His work has been part of collective shows such as Querer parecer noche (CA2M, Móstoles, 2018) and individual exhibitions like Trémula (CA2M, Móstoles, 2021), and has featured in art centres, festivals and national and international theatres. (CA2M, Móstoles, 2021), así como en centros de arte, festivales y teatros nacionales e internacionales.
Nilo Gallego is a musician and artist whose work always contains a playful strand, searching for interaction with the environment and everyday life. He designs tools and conducts education workshops based on listening and sound creation. cotidiano. Diseña herramientas e imparte talleres educativos basados en la escucha y la creación sonora.
Álvaro García holds a degree in physics from the University of Salamanca (2011). He is currently an associate professor in the area of Applied Physics at the Rey Juan Carlos University (Madrid). His research work pivots round non-linear physics and chaos theory, classic electrodynamics and the foundations of quantum mechanics, as well as stochastic processes with applications to biology. His most recent works have focused on studying how extensive electrodynamic bodies generate electromagnetic waves through the phenomenon of self-oscillation. His research has been published in journals such as Chaos Solitons & Fractals and forums that include NoLineal 20-21 (Madrid) and NODYCON 2023 (Rome).
Paz Rojo is a choreographer, dancer and researcher whose interests revolve around dance and its potential to create alternative ecologies that include debates on the ontology of dance in late capitalism and the aesthetics of dance after the end of the future. She attained a PhD in Performance Practices, specialising in Choreography, from the Stockholm University of the Arts with the research thesis The Decline of Choreography and Its Movement: a Body's (path)Way (2019). As part of this research, she published the book To Dance in the Age of No-Future (Circadian, 2020).
Programa
These laboratories are articulated from the concept of ruin, interweaving the temporal patterns of adults-senior citizens and adolescents-young people with the aim of making a third transitory, mutant and anachronistic place emerge. As part of this consideration, the aim is to advocate the communication between the bodies we were, the bodies we are and the bodies we are not. From the sensitive dimension of touch, we transmit, from one body to another, the visible and the invisible aspect of “things” (materials, structures, surfaces, affects, sensations, images). Moreover, we experience the material and sound dimensions of things that have all but disappeared or been forgotten. Things detained, those whose “scarcity awaits”; things whose survival allows for two vital attitudes: attention and listening. vitales: la atención y la escucha.
The laboratories are structured around six sessions aimed at two age groups. In the first phase, each group will work separately and, in the second, both temporalities/groups will come together to continue the practices generated with a view to carrying out a stage experiment to be shared with visitors on the final day of the laboratory. escénico que compartiremos con el público el último día del laboratorio.
Wednesday, 4, 18, and 25 October - from 5pm to 8:30pm
Laboratory Phase 1 for teenagers and young people from the ages of 15 to 25
Tuesday, 3, 17, and 24 October - from 10:30am to 2pm
Laboratory Phase 1 for people from the ages of 60 to 80
Wednesday, 15, 22, and 29 November – 5pm to 8:30pm
Laboratory Phase 2 with both groups together
Sabatini Building, Protocol Room
15 places in each laboratory
Free, until full capacity is reached, with prior registration via email by writing to comunidades@museoreinasofia.es, until 1 October, stating personal details (name, surname[s], phone number and email address). No prior experience needed. Full in-person attendance is required in both phases of the laboratory
Over the past year, artists Paz Rojo, Javier Cruz, Paulina Chamorro, José Luis Baringo and physicist Álvaro García have been meeting once a month around the book Prophetic Culture: Recreation for Adolescents (Bloomsbury Academic, 2021), by philosopher Federico Campagna. This encounter sees the group opening its doors to other people with an interest. (Enclave de Libros, 2022), del filósofo Federico Campagna. En este encuentro, el grupo abre sus puertas a personas interesadas.
From art, and more specifically from the sphere of performing arts and dance, and in the company of the metaphysical imagination offered both by Campagna’s text and other frames of reference, this reading day prompts a questioning of the modes of possible “worldification” (referring to world-building). Mindful of the fact that the job of art is not to predict the future but be capable of “seeing” the present or understanding future potentiality, what do we need to make it possible? Therefore, the encounter constitutes an invitation to think about this question and to ruminate on its ethical implications, going back to the sphere of the intuitive sensation of aesthetics and, consequently, picking up once again the Greek meaning of theatron, which alludes to a “place to see and listen rather than communicate”. To worldify, we need a theatre which enables us to develop forms of “opening our eyes” to reality after having “closed” them. Also bearing in mind that, far from being an active and conscious process, “seeing” is the capacity to recognise in us the wonder and mystery produced by listening to a terribly silent field: the encounter with an interior that was hitherto unknown to us.
Sabatini Building, Protocol Room
12 people
Free, until full capacity is reached, with prior registration via email by writing to comunidades@museoreinasofia.es, until 1 November, including personal details (name, surname[s], phone number and email)
This experiment brings together the retrospective memory of senior citizens and the projects and plans that are inherent in adolescence and youth with the aim of establishing visions around a spectral future. Participants seemingly destroy-build a set design around them: joining useless objects or those which have become isolated from use, abandoned things, things that are waiting, forgotten objects or other objects accompanying them right now. Materials which make up a skein of cultural memories, of dances which are scarcely the shadow of a tenuous recollection, of voices and sounds that allow the melody to be heard, in which the lived, that which survives and that which is to be lived emerge.
The experiment is the result of laboratories developed within the framework of Not Yet, Still, and features Nilo Gallego’s soundscape in collaboration
Sabatini Building, Room 102
40 people
Free, until full capacity is reached, with prior ticket collection at the Museo’s Ticket Offices or on the Museo Reina Sofía website from 10am on the penultimate working day before the activity. A maximum of 2 per person
Morir Bien is the alternative philosopher Federico Campagna puts forward while contemplating a cosmological landscape in ruins: our reality is being demolished and will be replaced with a new one, yet to be foretold. Our task, therefore, is to leave fertile ruins for those to come.
Morir Bien is the alternative philosopher Federico Campagna puts forward while contemplating a cosmological landscape in ruins: our reality is being demolished and will be replaced with a new one, yet to be foretold. Our task, therefore, is to leave fertile ruins for those to come.
The idea of prophetic culture articulates this open conversation between Federico Campagna and Paz Rojo, together with the reading group and audience in attendance, to unpick the reflections and practices embodied during the programme Not Yet, Still.
Language: English
Sabatini Building, Protocol Room
40 people
Free, until full capacity is reached, with prior ticket collection at the Museo’s Ticket Offices or on the Museo Reina Sofía website from 10am on the penultimate working day before the activity. A maximum of 2 per person