Oscar Murillo’s ‘The flooded garden’ accompanied by Lydia McGlinchey
As part of his Tate Modern presentation, The flooded garden, Oscar Murillo will be organizing a program of performances, which depart from the exhibition and flood the city of London with echoes of the exhibit. The performances will consist of concerts by the Mar, Río y Cordillera, a group invited from Colombia, as well as several performances developed by Lydia McGlinchey, performed by close colleagues and collaborators from Brussels. The performances will be publicly announced 48 hours before their happening making for lively and spontaneous encounters.
Lydia McGlinchey will be developing a choreographic score in dialogue with the formal and conceptual framework of Murillo’s flight drawings and Surge series as an impulse for embodiment. This work will build on their last encounter during Murillo’s exhibition‘Masses’ at Wiels in the performance series‘Echoing Spirits’.
“Surge, having the connotation for both natural and social movement, made me think of dealing with the body in two registers: the body as a material and the body as a social entity. This idea could equally depart from the way in which the exhibit superimposes plastic chairs (which represent informal social assembly) with the Surge paintings (whose mesmerizing visual effects connotes itself with water/energetic movement).
The performance will fluctuate, moving into peaks then subsidence, evolving through different modes of inhabiting/composing the space.
“Inspired by the way that a mass of marks and gestures works to create a larger affect in Murillo’s paintings, I think of the performance like an evolving atmosphere. One where an assemblage of bodies, gestures, text, and voices works to form greater feeling in the space. I would like to incorporate the idea of collective choreographies which hold tension through being formally mesmerizing, yet contain a subtle tone of brutality.”
In the spirit of Murillo’s interest in spontaneous live encounters, the choreography will be receptive and lively in nature.
“The performance I create together with the performers will remain reactive to possible unexpected encounters with one another and audience, allowing the space, public, and present to merge into the work, whilst staying connected to a choreographic impulse which links us. Our performance enables the work accumulating in the Tate to resonate in public space.”
The performance will transform through a series of three shows starting at the Tate south tanks on the 1st of August at 3pm, flooding to Regents park on the 9th of August at 4pm, and then on to Bethnal Green Gardens on the 17th of August.
These performences were commissioned by London based artist Oscar Murillo and Lydia will be collaborating with international performance artists Stefa Govaert, Nabil Ennassouh, Castélie Yalombo Lilonge, Mate Jonjic, Estefanía Álvarez Ramírez, Alphonse Eklou, Ching Shu Huang and Nathan Feliot.
Picture: performance during the expo‘Echoing Spirits’ by Oscar Murillo in Wiels, Brussels (2024)