Maria Jerez &
Juan Domínguez
THE BAROQUES
A film from the beginning of the century
July 11, 2024
at 7.30pm
Made and performed by
Maria Jerez & Juan Domínguez
Maria Jerez & Juan Domínguez
At the beginning of the 21st century, the COVID 19 pandemic caused 150.000.000 of deaths worldwide. A part of the tremendous tragedy, this pandemic also forced a global confinement. Millions of people were confined to their homes for months. Millions more had to go out to work in the middle of the pandemic.
Many projects of different kinds were postponed or cancelled.
The video-conference format made possible by software such as Zoom, Skype and apps like Jitsi and others, were some of the means by which many of these people were able to communicate, work and continue to develop projects from their confinement.
During this period the notion of time was often distorted, attention affected, daily situations at home had an oversized relevance or became totally absurd.
Bewilderment, uncertainty, anxiety, idleness, hyper activity, mistrust, all kinds of emotions emerged, you could even be suspicious of a door handle that you had been staring at for a long time.
Depending on the age, personality and the economical, family, geographical, political and social background, everyone experienced this state of alarm differently.
After the first moments of bewilderment, Maria and Juan continued working through the screen from their respective confinements in Madrid and Berlin.
The images of this film were shot in the spring of 2020 from inside their homes, including more or less everyday objects and working materials, as well as situations, events and phenomena that they saw through their windows and courtyards.
A year later, with the pandemic not yet over, they decide to meet and edit these visual conversations.
Maria Jerez
The work of María Jerez (Madrid, 1978) is situated “between” choreography, film and the visual arts. Beyond the interest in her first pieces from theatrical and cinematographic conventions and the spectator’s implicit understanding of them, in her latest works, she seeks to question this relationship by opening up potential spaces through encounters with what we find strange and alien.
Her most recent work insists on the performative nature of the encounter as a space for transformation. In this process of transformation, the “other” is lodged in oneself, establishing blurred borders between the known and the unknown, the object and the subject, the animate and the inanimate. Her work tries to escape from logocentric and anthropocentric logic, where human knowledge itself becomes vulnerable to other enigmatic and complex ecosystems.
María combines the production of her artistic work with pedagogical, curatorial and editorial projects.
Juan Domínguez
Juan Domínguez is a Spanish artist, choreographer, performer and curator based Berlin. Over the last three decades he has been engaged in projects that could be labeled as expanded choreographic practices or at the intersection between performance and live art. Over these years one major concern has been rethinking the potential of life art by constantly questioning life art conventions and Western expectations of spectatorship.
As a curator he has directed festivals and organized different curatorial projects in Madrid, Paris, Kortrijk, Hamburg, a.o.
His practice expands into different educational programs at universities and festivals as a workshop facilitator and mentor.
more information
www.juandominguezrojo.com