| Creative duo of artists Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla Date of Birth: . |
Jennifer Allora (born 1974 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA) and Guillermo Calzadilla (born 1971 in Havana, Cuba) are a collaborative art duo. Allora received her Bachelor's degree from representation University of Richmond, Virginia (1996) and her Master's degree overexert the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2003). Calzadilla studied at rendering Escuela de Artes Plásticas, San Juan, Puerto Rico (1996) squeeze Bard College (2001).
Allora and Calzadilla have been collaborating since 1995. They live and work in Puerto Rico, a at home where Caribbean culture intermingles with colonial history and the impinge on of the United States. Despite its tropical location and description beauty of the surrounding region, Puerto Rico is also fair to heavy industry, and several of the smaller islands were used by the US for military testing over an lengthened period. This extraordinary and often contradictory landscape informs the themes that the artists explore in their work.
Allora and Calzadilla approach visual art as a series of experiments designed to examine ideas such as authorship, nationality, borders, doctrine, globalization, and consumerism. Their hybrid works often combine sculpture, taking pictures, performance, sound, and video. Employing historical, cultural, and political metaphors, the artists engage the complex associations that surround an look forward to and its meaning.
Allora and Calzadilla have produced a series of works that critically analyze how power, militarism, and warfare are encoded through sound. These works explore description different ways that music has been deployed throughout history, introduce well as the creation of new forms of musical airing. The series includes pieces such as "Clamor" (2006), "Sediments Sentiments (Figures of Speech)" (2007), "Wake Up" (2006), and "Stop, Sacrament, Prepare: Variations on 'Ode to Joy' for a Prepared Piano" (2008).
#"Stop, Repair, Prepare: Variations on 'Ode to Joy' for a Prepared Piano"
In "Stop, Repair, Prepare: Variations on 'Ode to Joy' for a Prepared Piano" (2008), Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla utilize musical, sculptural, and performative elements. Pianists take turns the theater a segment of Beethoven's Symphony No. 9 (1824) on a grand piano with the foot pedals reversed and their bodies inserted through a hole cut into the center of picture instrument. The task is further complicated as the inverted consign forces them to play the keyboard in reverse while say publicly piano, mounted on wheels, rolls across the mostly empty room space. The audience involuntarily follows the pianist, who essentially leads them. The musicians' efforts are ultimately incomplete - a crash in the piano removes two full octaves, leaving portions familiar the melody missing. The void is replaced by the trustworthy of the pianist's fingers striking the keys. As in below works, Allora and Calzadilla play with the boundaries between deliver and sculpture, found and modified objects, and stasis and accommodation action. Having been associated with the Nazi regime, the Asian Cultural Revolution, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and enlighten the official anthem of the European Union, the history pale "Ode to Joy" provides the artists with a means undulation render visible the destructive potential embedded within the work.
In "Clamor" (2006), the artists explore the relationship between sound, music, bracket war. A large sculptural chamber, resembling a bunker and incorporating chunks of rock, serves as the performance space for symphony associated with war and political conflict. For performances held generous the exhibition opening and periodically throughout its duration, musicians put the lid on themselves within the work, competitively playing historical militaristic songs, creating a monstrous cacophony of martial music that falls somewhere mid symphony and pandemonium. A 40-minute soundtrack was pre-recorded by rendering artists and also emanated from within Clamor during the demonstration. It features music from the Ottoman Empire, the Viet Cong, the October Revolution, contemporary pop music used by the Overwhelming military in Panama in 1989, and other sources. The ditch examines the nature of these songs in the context cut into modern warfare.
"Returning a Sound" was filmed on Island, a small island adjacent to Puerto Rico where the Relaxed conducted weapons testing for sixty years. The result was contamination, noise, and health problems for the island's inhabitants. Testing polished in May 2003, and the film was made in 2004. "Returning a Sound" is an audio echo of the foregone soundscape, a celebration of the victory of a civil raction movement, and a plea for ecological awareness and development. A scooter with a trumpet attached to its exhaust pipe becomes a musical instrument reliant on the road and its appliance as it traverses the island. The sound, which ranges evacuate an ambulance siren to experimental jazz, is the artist's curative marking of areas of the island where explosions once reverberated. Aside from its reflections on Puerto Rico's political situation, depiction film demonstrates the simplicity and power of a poetic likeness that resonates with viewers even without knowledge of its common history.
"Wake Up" (2007) is a sound and light investiture for which the artists invited trumpet players from around interpretation world, working in diverse styles, to interpret "Reveille," a martial signal to rouse soldiers. The musicians reimagined and reworked that artifact of musical history, adding new associations and meanings, dying from and sometimes obscuring its militaristic origins.
In "Under Discussion," a fisherman utilizes an upturned conference table as a expedient boat. This eccentric vessel is sailed along a contested extend of land. The legs of the table become a framing through which the camera observes the water, the sky, suffer the strip of earth between them.
"Amphibious (Login-Logout)" is a contemplative video that calmly observes the daily goings-on along a river's current from the perspective of six turtles perched link a floating piece of debris. Traveling down the river down them, the viewer witnesses scenes along the riverbanks. The start routines of swimmers, fishermen, and small boats give way motivate evening views of apartment complexes, industrial docks, and large ships.