Invisible cities
Residenties
- 21.08 > 25.08.2023
The creative process of Invisible cities begins as a reflection on the artist migration from Buenos Aires to Brussels. And it is followed by the subsequent displacements to other cities he has gone to for work reasons. These (un)forced movements depict the parkour made by a Latinx artist living and surviving in Europe as an entry point to re-sensitize the way we think of Migration. The City is read as a project of modernity and a continent of social conflict.
We inhabit the cities, and they inhabit us. As we migrate, we carry our identity, narrative, cultural background, and history. Geographic borders and body limits gets stretched by migration to an extent in which it seems possible to be simultaneously in two different cities.
What happens between distant cities when they sound together? How do they get along? What are the conflicts between them? This way, cities become dynamic subjects that change and transition in different moods.
Invisible cities is a solo piece that proposes a synaesthetic experience where Migration, as its critical theme, gets embodied in the audience’s flesh.
Departing from his family migrant background Echegoyen uses field recordings from the urban contexts of five different metropolises to create, first a performative sound installation where urban soundscapes cohabit bringing together distant places, and then turning the installation into the set design of an experimental performance where cities are the main characters. He creates ambiences and moods for the storytelling to come across during the piece, bringing together a crowded Sunday market and people fighting back the police in a demonstration or perhaps a silent corner of the darkest street and the mystic reverberations of a silent and open-sky temple.
As the piece unfolds, it will become the space where the overlapped cities trigger a re-sensitization on the way we perceive and approach them, where distance can fold and scale down, making time bend, and where migrants’ stories will connect life experiences from different corners of the globe.
In the frame of the summer residencies supported by N22, VGC and Brussels community centers.
concept, director and performer: Diego Echegoyen I collaborators: Ezequiel Menalled, Jimena Perez Salerno, Goda Palekaite