VOYAGE TO A WRINKLED PLAIN
In 1962, prompted by a friend on the deadly effects of pesticides in a bird sanctuary, Rachel Carlson wrote what would become one of the most influential books of the twentieth century, Silent Spring. The book soon became a publishing success and provided the basis for a whole series of groundbreaking movements and environmental legislations. In it, the danger of a spring without birds and insects, made the author turn public the adverse effects of human activities on the environment.
Inspired by this alert, by this silent world and the worst environmental disasters caused by man, Voyage to a wrinkled plain takes the audience to a world recreated by their feet on a carpet-map, portal and place of access to the great dilemma of thinking as part of a common scene where men has an impact of geological force on the planet.
Voyage to a wrinkled plain is the second chapter of the trilogy Gentleness of a giant. The project adopts a common practice for architects and engineers: the creation of landscapes in miniature on a surface. Using the same strategy, the bodies of a man and a woman move and are at the same time figure and active background, giant bodies that mirror themselves in what they build. As temporary owners of a territory, they manipulate materials that give rise to mountains, oceans, rivers and plains in a panorama of the dangers of the human reconfiguration of nature.
Divided into 3 separate episodes, each one with a different couple and surface, the project adopts each time a specific format: a gallery room, a theatre black box, a movie theatre. Gentleness of a giant | Voyage to a wrinkled plain, the Uruguayan episode, is the result of the residences of the Brazilian choreographer Gustavo Ciriaco in collaboration with dancer Natalia Viroga, lighting designer Santiago Tricot and visual artist Juan Pablo Campistrous, at FIDCU – Festival Internacional de Danza Contemporanea de Uruguay (April, 2016), in Montevideo and at Arqueologías del Futuro (December, 2016), in Buenos Aires. The piece has its première under Bienal SESC de Dança, in Campinas (September, 2017).
Press
Gentleness of a Giant gathers a man and a woman as the ones standing out in the construction and destruction of the landscapes; Voyage to a Wrinkled Plain, in turn, plunges into environmental catastrophes that wouldn’t need not occur. Both pieces can be watched independently; yet it is a revelation divided into two experiences. (…)
They’re 2 experiences. And these two works are so beautiful and simple that they surprise in the immediacy with which they provoke silence and guide our eyes to the gestures and aesthetic answers. Ciríaco continues to draw the contours of his surroundings, to think the individual, the act of living, the conviviality, the other, except that now he expands this perception to the whole, to the world, to stories, to that is urgent. He is another artist, still being himself. Or maybe that’s just a second parcel of his. His own continuation. His being himself and altogether new when continuing. What there is no doubt about is that this diptych is one of the most interesting shows at this Biennial, for how the artist reinvents himself and for the dilemmas that he points at to the human being without having to make minor opportunistic speeches. His poetry overcomes the need of any speech. It becomes art.
Revista Antropositivo, São Paulo, Sep. 2017.