Assemblea coral ocellaire

The Creation and Museums programme* has reached the Contemporary Art Centre in collaboration with La Escocesa. From February to June, Elena Maravillas, resident artist at La Escocesa, has developed a research process that has been activated as a group performance as part of Festival Grec.

Neither birds nor other beasts have a place in museums. But they do on their facades, on their terraces, in their courtyards, within their premises, in their narratives and in their representations. Outside the Art Centre, there is a beyond-what-is-human ecosystem that builds and alters the urban space and its use. So, what happens when we break through this boundary, knock down the doors and open the windows? What can be learnt from the coexistence with other non-human communities?

Using group performance as a research tool and focusing on urban birds, the Assemblea coral ocellaire proposes a bodily approximation to these other subjectivities. The birds we live alongside are political subjects in that they reach consensus and build their decisions as part of a community. Ethological studies question the mechanisms that generate these agreements and the different aspects that make pacts among a flock possible. The responses are multiple and, in most cases, situated. For this reason, the Assemblea coral ocellaire is a place for experimenting with other mechanisms for creating community and culture through performance actions that investigate these other forms of dialogue, generating a final work along the lines of a new opera. Based on the collection of spectrograms of bird songs and calls, compositions are generated in the form of concerts that investigate the concepts of communication and dialogue.

To carry out the project, a continuity group was created where the interaction between scientific-academic knowledge and artistic practices would allow the field to be explored, generating a fertile and sustainable exchange over time, to create a collective choral performance to present the group’s questions and conclusions.

During the fifteen sessions that made up the process of Assemblea coral ocellaire, the participants interacted with both the exterior spaces of the Fabra i Coats premises and the inside spaces of the Art Centre, aiming to seek the dissolution between these two spaces and find forms of connection between the interior and exterior. The proposal also used the areas surrounding the centre to carry out studies of urban birds and explore how these non-human communities interact with and transform the space.