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The Boogie - Woogie Ghost. María Jerez y Silvia Zayas
Madrid

The Boogie - Woogie Ghost. María Jerez y Silvia Zayas

SELECTED project BMM2018

Image: María Jerez & Silvia Zayas. The Boogie-Woogie Ghost, 2018.

The Boogie-Woogie Ghost is a project by María Jerez and Silvia Zayas that investigates the possibilities of the proposed device and the agency of objects, as well as the spatial, temporal and choreographic relations of a 20-30’ film with an ordinary space, such as a sitting room. The idea of using an everyday space, a house, highlights the utilisation of familiar furniture and objects with the aim of destabilising their established contours and predetermined uses which, in combination with other, more abstract materials, propose a space of indeterminacy and uncertainty.

The seen appears through the unseen: the movement of bodies that remain invisible effects changes in the objects and the space. What spectators see is constantly changing, but the underlying cause of those changes remains hidden. The possibilities of the slightest alteration in the image produce variations in the mental image. The space is constantly mutating, as if non-human forces were incessantly working to destabilise and activate it. The tension between the visible and the invisible produces the iterative activation of the image. The montage of the images does not take place in a post-production process; rather, it operates within the logic of what is not seen at the moment an image is captured. In this way, the montage becomes a dance, or dance becomes a montage, a dance of ghosts.

Here the idea of the ghost is not explored as a cliché but as a quest for non-anthropomorphic movements. In the film, we see only the effects, not the causes, of any movement happening outside the frame. It is as though the space were activated by strange forces through its own agency of change and mutation.

The bodies that effect changes in the image move things and always remain hidden to avoid being caught on camera. There is a tension between the high speed of the objects’ activation by the body outside the frame and the slow, thoughtful appearance of the image. The idea is that objects of different sizes can move as if they were self-activated (vibrating, falling, etc.), with no trace of human movement.

The ideas behind The Boogie-Woogie Ghost emerged in the course of Jumping Scales, a research project conducted by Silvia Zayas at Matadero-Madrid, where she invited María Jerez and several others to work with her for two weeks. After that experience, they presented a practical experiment, inviting 12 people to work on a new sequence where their bodies acted to compose an image.

To stage this experiment, we invited 12 people to personally explore the creation of a new sequence in which our bodies simultaneously go into action to compose an image.

Shooting
18 - 21 June 2018
Buñol, Valencia
With the collaboratión of Alejandra Pombo and Víctor Colmenero.

Premiere
4 December 2018
Matadero-Madrid, El Taller
20:30-21:30 h

www.mataderomadrid.org

The Boogie-Woogie Ghost will also be presented integrated in the project La Paradoja con los Pelos Mezclados, at Kunstencentrum BUDA (Kortrijk, Belgium) in February 2019, and at Naves de Matadero / Centro Internacional de Artes Vivas, in March 2019.

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