ARETXT : La Biennale di Venezia
54 Esposizione Internazionale d'Arte
Giardini di Castello - Stati Uniti

GLORIA
ALLORA & CALZADILLA

Six new works by the collaborative duo of Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla will be occupying the American Pavilion this summer at the Venice Biennale.

The aestheticized idealism of the name, Gloria, similary concatenates martial, religious, and athletic references. These newly commissioned sculptures are, like the Ode to Joy piece, designed for performance: Body in Flight (Delta) and Body in Flight (American) are scale-modl wooden replican of the businnes-class airplane seats, refitted to work as pommel horse and beam for gymnastic exercises: Track and Field retrofits a military tanks, inverting it so that its treads can serve as a treadnill.

The Biennale gymnastic projects deterritorialize ergonomics: among the many associative chains in play are illusions to international businnes travel and the national rhe toric of arline industries in their nomenclature, the juxtaposition of the idealized athletic body with the neoliberal fetishizing of business.
Similary, Track and Field sets up the resonances of is title words with military tracking and fields of battle (the martial is a recurrent theme in Allora & Calzadilla's oevre).

G. C. We see a fundamental relationship between violence and form in the sense that the creation of all forms entails a certain violence—the exclusion of everything the said form is not. The idea of “conflict as an aesthetic force” is much more troubling for us, as it asks how social violence in the form of conflict affects sensory values and taste. This is a provocative question that opens up new angles we hadn’t considered before in the relation of our work to militarism and music.
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CM Your work’s relationship to history and the political seems to be mediated by language, storytelling, and narrative. Your projects provide alternative ways to “read” canonical interpretations of history. Also, as the answers in this interview make evident, discourse is essential to your practice. You carefully construct meaning by way of language in addition to your work with form. Can you talk about the role of language, speech, and narration in your work?

JA Language has played such a central role in our practice mainly because of the fact that we collaborate. We are two people with different backgrounds, subjectivities, and ideas who must find a way to communicate in order to work together. So language has become a very obvious place to begin this dialogue.

GC Our particular pleasure in looking into the origins of words is an extension of this. It is both useful and fascinating to us to see how words have taken different turns in meaning as they have moved through times and cultures, and inversely, in what distant universe of meaning a word began, and how those etymological beginnings might still haunt its understanding and use in the present.
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GC We’re interested in those moments in which the work “shows” at the level of form and content something that interrupts and alters its context and predetermined meaning: the ever-present possibility within a form or matrix of a future that could be something other than an extension of the present.  BOMB 109/Fall 2009

Curator : Lisa D. Freiman

Artisti : Allora & Calzadilla

Web site:http://www.imamuseum.org/venice