AzkonaToloza Company
Located halfway between the Mediterranean Sea, the Pyrenees and the Atacama desert (Chile), Laida Azkona Goñi and Toloza Toloza-Fernández are a couple of artists dedicated to the realization of live art projects.
Interested in the infinite possibilities of poetry and visual anthropology, lofi video creation, performance and movement, their latest creations focus on the re-reading of official history and documentary creation designed for the scene. Understanding as a scene from the hall of an opera house to the immensity of an altiplanic salt flat.
Cuerpos Celestes
Residency May 2024
As usual in the work of AzkonaToloza, Cuerpos Celestes is born from some questions that were left unanswered in the previous pieces.
After eight years touring Abya Yala with the Trilogía Pacífico, looking for the cracks left by colonialism and capitalist barbarism on life on the planet, diving into the consequences of unregulated extractivism and the geopolitical relations that root all of this, the questions piled up: what now? Where are we going? What surface should we trace? Which voices should we listen to? And the first clue was in the last verse of Teatro Amazonas: “Now, it’s time to slow down and listen.”
Because listening was the starting point of the new journey that the company embarked on with Canto Mineral, a piece that opened FALLA, a series of works of documentary research, speculative reality and science fiction through which the artists are now navigating. After years of paying attention to human voices and stories, now whom the turn to listen to? What if it wasn’t humans? Neither the animals nor the trees will have the last word, as Joan Brossa wrote. What if they were stones, minerals or electromagnetic waves? This is the first gesture of the project: removing the human from the center of the scene to place the mineral there. To hear how our voices enter into dialogue with the crunch of the stones and the frequencies of the satellite movements.
Because the systems of hierarchical classification of nature, which place the mineral at the opposite extreme and inferior to the human, result in an uncontrolled exploitation of the mineral resources of the planet and the celestial bodies. Mineral barbarism. In the midst of this climate emergency, wouldn’t it help us to recognize that carbon is the basis of life? Or that calcium, phosphorus and potassium are only three of the fourteen essential minerals for the functioning of the human body?
Can we affirm without fear of being wrong, that geological systems are not living? And that neither are the stars and planets that orbit us are not? Are we ready to see magma turn into blood? To see how our body turns into rock? A rock that keeps vibrating, creaking and cracking. A hard rock that dances without stopping, in the middle of the tremor.
The company is now arriving at El Canal for a residency to work on the technical assembly of the piece, as well as to rehearse with the artistic team and continue working on the play’s dramaturgy.
