2008/09/16

Xepa (Carlos Trovão, Marcelino Peixoto and Margarida Campos) in SPA of Arts in Recife, Brasil – 2008 September 7-14


In SPA of Arts, Xepa presents a project of urban intervention that problematizes the relationship between the material and its destruction. Construction and fall of bodies - action that is part of homonymous series - is organized from the tensions established by sliding strategies: from construction to the ruining, from balance to the tumbling, from presence to the disappearance. From that points come the quality of this project, that moves the artistic object from the visibility field to the field of the absence, maintaining, however, the traces of its passage through the urban and daily domain, transforming the city of Recife in a support.

Accomplished in Argentina in 2007 - with the title El precio de los ladrillos no se pelea (The price of the bricks cannot be fought), in Paseo del Buen Pastor, Córdoba, as part of Mercosul Theatre Festival programming - and foreseen to be presented in 2nd Biennial International of Performance / 2008 LatinAmerican Circuit – ‘Nomadismo, Cuerpo y Ciudad: desplazamientos y desplazados’ (Nomadism, Body and City: displacements and displaced) – in November of this year in Chile, the series of actions Construction and fall of bodies has in SPA of Arts of Recife 2008 its first occurrence instance in Brazil. We believe that its unpublished character reinforces the symbolic effectiveness of the proposed intervention, that call the public space as a physical and human component of the forms that will be built. Using procedures and usual, ordinary and elementary technical resources of construction - the brick and the body that carries it and piles up it - this action subverts their functional use in a performance marked by the singular poetic of a workpiece that overflows: in the place of the durability and resistance, it brings the excess and the debris.
_____________________

Construction and fall of the bodies is the action where the members of XEPA work for something like two hours building walls of bricks that tumble when arrive in their balance limit. To each fall it is begun the construction of a new wall that also aims the fall. At the end of 3.000 bricks, it remains the trace of the action - an action that, in the act of building, ends building a ruin.

1 – Build a wall with bricks made of burned clay;
2 - Pile up the bricks until its force line disrupt itself;
3 - Leave the to tumble down;

4 - Begin to build another wall and repeat the items 1, 2 and 3 until finish the bricks.