Lola Arias
- workshop
Lola Arias invites artists from different backgrounds (visual artists, musicians, writers, directors) to work on a personal research, a radical experience, a story that secretly obsesses them... under the form a performative lecture.
My documents
Lola Arias invites artists from different backgrounds (visual artists, musicians, writers, directors) to work on a personal research, a radical experience, a story that secretly obsesses them... under the form a lecture-performance.
During the workshop Lola Arias will guide the artists to develop a lecture performance based on a personal archive (Family photos, found footage, songs, letters, films, political posters). My Documents has a minimal format: the artist on stage with his or her documents. A way of bringing to light the kind of research that often gets lost in a nameless folder in a computer.
The genre of lecture performance was created by Joseph Beuys and Robert Smithson as a way of turning a speech into a work of art. In recent years, the format has proliferated in theatre, dance and the visual arts, becoming one of the variants of conceptual performance. Since four years, Lola Arias is doing a lecture performance cycle called MY DOCUMENTS in which she explores the relationship between research and art, personal stories and History, teaching and performance.
With the support of Kaaitheater.
Lola Arias
Lola Arias is a writer, theatre director, and performer. She collaborates with artists from different disciplines in music, film and art projects. Her productions play with the overlap zones between reality and fiction. She works with actors, policemen, beggars, musicians, dancers, prostitutes, children and animals. In "Striptease" (2007) the protagonist is a baby, who crawls on stage while his parents are arguing on the phone. In "El amor es un francotirador" (2007), the performers relate true and fictional love stories while a rock band plays live. In "Mi vida después" (2009), six performers reconstruct their parents’ youth in 1970’s Argentina by means of photos, letters, cassettes and old clothes.
She staged "Familienbande" (2009) about a family with two mothers at Kammerspiele, Munich, and "That Enemy Within" (2010) in collaboration with two identical twins at HAU, Berlin. In Chile, she staged "The year I was born" (2012), based on biographies of people born during Pinochet’s dictatorship. "Melancolía y Manifestaciones" (2012) is a play about her mother’s depression that was produced in Buenos Aires and opened in Vienna. Her piece "The Art of Making Money" (2013) was performed by beggars, prostitutes and street musicians from the city of Bremen.
Together with Ulises Conti, she composes and plays music, and released the albums "El amor es un francotirador" (2007) and "Los que no duermen" (2011).
Her projects with Stefan Kaegi (Rimini Protokoll) are "Chácara Paraíso" (2007) involving Brazilian police officers, and "Airport Kids" (2008) with global nomads aged between 7 and 13 years old. Between 2010 and 2012, they curated a Festival of urban interventions Ciudades Paralelas in Berlin, Buenos Aires, Warsaw, Zurich, Singapore and other cities.
She published poetry, fiction and plays: "Las impúdicas en el paraíso" (2000), "La escuálida familia" (2001), "Poses para dormir" (2005), "Striptease/Sueño con revólver/ El amor es un francotirador" (2007), and "Los posnucleares" (2011).
Her texts have been translated into more than seven languages, Lola Arias’ works for theatre have been performed at festivals including Steirischer Herbst, Graz; Festival d’Avignon; Theater Spektakel, Zurich; Wiener Festwochen; Spielart Festival, Munich; Alkantara Festival, Lisbon; Radicals Festival, Barcelona, Under the radar, NY. And in venues like: Theatre de la ville Paris, Red Cat LA, Walker Art Centre Minneapolis, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.
Illustration
The Cifas asks contemporary artists to illustrate its communication. Anne Fontenelle illustrated the workshop led by Lola Arias.
Graphic designer and illustrator based in Brussels, Anne Fontenelle was born in Charleroi in 1982. Even though her work cannot be easily categorised, it is characterised by a pen and ink drawing with powerful style, almost classical. Her drawing swings between pain, cruelty as well as melancholia emanating of a certain ethereal beauty. Her work is reflects an endless questioning and obsessive doubts. Her passion for animal and vegetal realms nourrishes her work.
www.annefontenelle.com