Immediate Archaeologies
Morgan Belenguer & Luis Berríos-Negrón
July 9 – August 1, 2009
Architecture is a discourse in which knowledge is neither legitimized with mathematical certainty nor is it wholly derived from poetic inspiration. Research, as PROGRAM has been conducting it through exhibition programming and commissioned projects, involves the practice of developing and discovering renewed attitudes towards architecture – its spaces, its materials, its histories. As with Thirty-two Fingers (March 2008) and Two Point Five (September 2008), PROGRAM has invited choreographer Morgan Belenguer and architect/artist Luis Berríos-Negrón to develop an exhibition within the space of three weeks. Immediate Archaeologies engages both the gallery space and PROGRAM’s institutional structure, the pair seeks to expose the site and its contingencies through a daily examination of its material history.
Artists' Statement:
Materiality and its values, environmental and emotional, load every dimension of production. If PROGRAM is considered as a site for the recovery of experiences that have emerged during its three-year history, then it is the minutiae of remaining standard and non-standard material resources that dictate a field of knowledge – its institutional memory. The psychogeography of this field is excavated through our reconfiguration, as architect and choreographer, of props found on site. By continuously summoning one another's expertise, through spatial and corporeal rituals, the process takes the shape of ongoing classification, questioning the subject between fact and truth.
This experimental period (July 9 - August 1) began without preconception and has evolved during a series of daily engagements with PROGRAM's directors and other practitioners based in Berlin. The end result is unknown, but the intent is to reinterpret or even translate how the project space has evolved, and where art thrives in between the framing of events and its network of time-based relations, which, not unlike the conception of history, involves the manufacture of facts.
Vignettes [please click on the thumbnail to watch video]
Correcting
Demarking
Dicking
Digging
Displacing
Drawing
From A to B
Incising
Lamenting
Meurtriere
Overview
Peeking
Pitching
Placing
Replacing
Stitching
Support
Sympathy
Transportings
Transposing
Trapping
Twitching
Tying
Washing ErasingMorgan Belenguer is a choreographer living and working in Berlin. He completed his education at the atelier Rudra Béjart. He participated in the Choreographic competition Hannover, where he won the 2nd prize with Alchera in 1999 and the next year the critic prize for L'incessante which was then invited to the Holland Dance Festival. Since 2000 Belenguer has pursued his choreographic work internationally for Ballet du Rhin, Theaterhaus Stuttgart, Rotterdam Dance Academy, and the CCR Dance Company Istanbul. Since 2007 he has collaborated with Melanie Lane as artists in residence at Dock 11 Berlin. Their last 2 productions include Riddle (2007) and Held (2008). Belenguer directed and produced the music video clip Bim for the artist Ellen Allien (Bpitch Control Record Label).
Luis Berríos-Negrón (*1971, Puerto Rico) focuses on visual arts, material economies, and mass customization through the lens of architecture. He has received various awards, including the Parsons-Kalil Award for Smart Design and the MIT-Schnitzer Award for the Visual Arts. He has had solo and group exhibitions, installations and architectural design projects in over 10 countries including 'Nonspheres IV' project for Program in 2007, 'Verde que te quiero Verde' in Kabul, and the 'Fledermäusehaus' for London's Phillips de Pury and Adventure Ecology. His most recent project was the 'Stonemasonry in Context' Workshop in Mallorca. [www.luisberriosnegron.org].
Special thanks to Luuk Vlamings.