Performance:
"Carrying the Castle in Your Body" by Antònia del Río

• Day: January 26
• Time: 7 pm
• venue: Auditori
• Free activity with prior registration

“Carrying the Castle in Your Body” is a video-performance by Antònia del Río, linked to her exhibition that can be visited at Es Baluard Museu until January 29. The artist embodies the experience of bodily memory, an unconscious psychomotor memory. The places we live, but also the jobs we do or our gender, condition the way we move, and therefore our bodies tend to make some gestures and not others. Antònia del Río emphasises organic gestures and residual gestures, those that happen unconsciously, to talk about the domestication of bodies and established roles.

With the premise of questioning a reality that is presented to us as unique, Del Río develops forms of production that destabilise those of the traditional narrative around the castle of Alaró. The video-performance explores the multiplicity of supports and disconnections of the image, which escapes the logic of explanation and description, and does not show what we would like to see: perhaps a castle? The performance thinks of this “stage”, the castle, to show us a corporeal image. The action completes the artist’s work process in the exhibition “Having the Castle in Mind, Carrying the Castle in Your Body” in which she approaches an unknown place, the castle of Alaró, based on the descriptions of the people who live in the Mallorcan village to reflect on the social construction of the landscape.

Antònia del Río (Capdepera, Mallorca,1983) graduated in Fine Arts in Barcelona and is currently a PhD student in Advanced Studies of Artistic Productions. Her projects, which encompass traditional and expanded drawing, digital and interactive tools, photography, publishing and the artist’s book, focus on exploring mechanisms for the transmission and loss of knowledge, establishing an inevitable dialogue between memory and oblivion. A theme that she has developed by focusing her interest on issues as diverse as the trace, the absent, memory, collective memory, permanence and discarding in history, and also the storerooms of memory, such as libraries and archives. Her work has been exhibited at the Centre d’Arts Santa Mònica and the Fundació Suñol, both in Barcelona, La Casa Encendida in Madrid and the Centre d’Art Tecla Sala in L’Hospitalet, among others. In parallel to her artistic production, Antònia del Río is active in the field of art education: she is a lecturer at the University of Barcelona and a member of the team of the contemporary education and creation space Experimentem amb l’ART.