EXHIBITION STATEMENT
For the 9th time, Atelier Mondial and IAGN collaborate through an exhibition that brings together the 1st and 2nd year Master students and the international resident artists cur- rently living and working at Atelier Mondial in Basel. The exhibition coincides with the Spring Symposium on Animal Dancing as a Technology of Co-Evolving Bodies, echoing and reverberating its topics.
DUENDE! Engages with how movement and transformation are implicated in art. It at- tends to the challenges imposed to figuration of action in drawing, painting and sculp- ture; it considers the role that dance plays in cinematic narratives; and it looks at the on- going exchanges between the choreographic, the performative and the theatrical.
DUENDE! Is a tribute to artist Simone Forti, for whom this term was so important. She defined dance behaviour as a kind of duende: “a certain gear, a certain patterning of the neuro-chemical system among the many patternings of gears in the repertoire of the living being, as are the states of sleeping, or of concentrating on a problem or of sexual arousal”. In thinking dance as a form of being possessed by a duende spirit, she was inspired by Federico García Llorca’s idea that the duende is “a mysterious force that everyone feels and no philosopher has explained […] the duende is a force not a labour, a struggle not a thought […] the duende is not in the throat: the duende surges up, inside, from the soles of the feet.’ Meaning, it’s not a question of skill, but of a style that’s truly alive: meaning, it’s in the veins”.
