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Nearly 90

Photos for Merce Cunningham´s dance group last performance

I was asked by Benedetta tagliabue´s studio EMBT -- in charge of designing the architecture structure of Cunningham´s last performance NEARLY 90 -- to photograph the first rehearsals all together, 3 days prior the premiere at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM).


I had never seen contemporary dance in my life. In fact I never liked dance (or ballet) until this moment. I was struck by the architectural qualities of the dancers, their bodies as perfect structures. It was so abstract and conceptual I suddenly understood what dance was all about. Since I have grown to like it a lot. Specially this type of conceptual dance, or movement.

I had just arrived to New York, and this told me all I needed to know about living in this city. I was in search of a wider definition of architecture. Or at least what it could be... Sonic Youth were the live musicians on stage and sorry to forget the name of the visual imagery makers. Beautiful limbs of dancers hanging from the ceiling... The whole thing coming together was my first live class on indeterminacy. This is where Yago Conde got his "Arquitectura de la Indeterminación" via John Cage, Merce´s partner. I had arrived in school, the real one.


Witnessing this coming together of all these diferents arts was amazing. This was exactly why I moved to new York. So eventhough I did nothing in this gesamtkunstwerk of art and architecture, but take pictures for the architect, I am adding them here, since it was really important for me.


THIS IS WHAT I LOVE

Project Gallery

Idée Fixe  is a Transdisciplinary Studio of Art and Architecture, run by Cristina Guadalupe Galván.

If in a website you normally find finished objects and products to share, what we are sharing here are more ideas – tested, developed and lived -- and their processes, that in many instances ended up happily physical. The creative process is about experimentation and the life that goes with it. The life and the people.

While building this site I came across a quote that explained it to me much better, by architects Josep Ferrando & Marta Poch, for their Quaderns d´Arquitectura, issue 273, THE THINKING TRADE:

      In a world dominated by images of the finished object and the immediacy of access to multimedia content, this issue of Quaderns sets out to reflect on the role of the architect –by means of their working processes, of the working methods (…) leaving the image of the built project on the background.

For artist Sol LeWitt, the process was also the work:

      The idea becomes a machine that makes the art. (...) It is the process of conception and realization with which the artist is concerned. 

Architect Josep Maria Sostres said something similar:

      The project, obviously as a mental conception, as a will to form, has a sovereignty, it has an internal power that must be imposed.

So this archive-website of Idee-Fixe, records more these ideas, processes and in many instances the collaborations that made them possible.

It´s about THE LIFE OF IDEAS.

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