Marina Planas

 

 

 

Performance

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“Southern Highway” is a gesture in which I propose to establish the relationship between the body and the archive as a practice of activation through the organism and dramaturgy, conceiving the archive as a living entity in which bodies not only transit but also awaken meanings and reveal absences through presence. In this project I am interested in seeing how images are activated through obsolete technologies such as overhead projectors and transparencies; optical effects such as old camera filters and magnifying glasses; and vintage objects belonging to the Planas Archive collection that refer to the flora and fauna of the islands and in general to the aesthetics of tourism. The idea is for it to be a very analogical activation, both for the presence of the offline body, as well as for the objects used and the imaginaries they produce. 

 

The action “Southern Highway” refers to a story by Julio Cortázar that Jean Luc Godard later adapted to the cinema under the title of “Weekend”, in which a series of people are trapped for several days in a traffic jam caused by an accident on the highway between Fontainebleau and Paris on a Sunday afternoon. In the performance, I propose to use the same metaphor, taken to the extreme, since it is no longer about a Sunday afternoon, but about our vacation in a place that is supposed to be idyllic but that, upon arrival, is infested with people, traffic and overcrowding, with the typical accidents that overcrowded places entail. It is a metaphor for our own lives: it is not that we live trapped in a routine in our daily lives, but that this agonizing feeling of perpetual traffic jams even extends to our vacations and our touristic destinations, putting ourselves for days in a row in queues and waiting.