El cielo era más claro en aquellos días…

‘The sky was clearer in those days’ realised the initial and exploratory first phase of a large-scale interventional live art work within the context of an international contemporary performance programme and auditorium. The work was commissioned by cultural centre Naves Matadero in Madrid, as the open work of the venue’s major 2019-2020 season, within the centre’s ‘Terreno Común/Common Ground’ programme – an international initiative being produced in partnership with the Siemens Stiftung Foundation, to commission a series of major new works that might allow and include a significant aspect of collaboration and interchange between Europe and Latin America. The work as initially developed across a two-month period of research residencies and fieldwork in Chile, facilitated with additional supported by NAVE Santiago in Chile, Wales Arts International, British Council Chile and Centro Cultural España. And was subsequently created and performed in Madrid, premiering in September 2019.

‘The sky was clearer in those days’ took the public dismantling of a used family car, into its smallest possible components, as the central and defining structural act of the work – a task that the authors and their collaborators undertook over a ten-day period, within the venue’s main 900m² performance space. Across this period the work was presented as a series of five distinct large-scale public performance episodes, each offering a distinct phase of the car’s progressive deconstruction – and each using addition media and textual work to provide an additional frame and possible perspective onto the issues and connection revealed or arising through that act of deconstruction.

Research questions include:
How might established processes of artistic intervention and located performance begin to both address and perform their locale at multiple and expanded scales, to consider and reveal the wider landscapes and ecologies they act within?
How might a single artistic act or image be activated to reveal or operate within multiple scales of its location simultaneously?
In what ways might the disassembly of a modern human-made object, if broken down into all its separate components, begin to reveal the scale of spatial and temporal connections that were needed to bring it together?
In what ways might such an act of disassembly, done and presented publicly, expand our understanding of how much our daily actions and interactions increasingly blur the differences between what is local and what is global, and the extent to which things that happen in one place are also part of what is happening everywhere else?
How might an artistic event allow and enable direct and shared public encounters with such an expanded and expanding sense of place?