Seville: the bones and the compass

Sevilla Residency (cc) Ricardo Barquín

We have come to seville to dig the bones out of the graves. To a city full of buried ruins, to a walled city. The walls have, amongst other things, a red gate (gate of the flesh), and a white gate (gate of the ossary). In order to find the bones, one has to, preferably, get their hands dirty. And enjoy oneself. Our mission? To dig a tunnel in order to enter the labyrinth of the project, to open a new door which can allow us to cook together some foundations for the live-cinema spectacle, which will open in amsterdam in a few months as a result of this exciting and ambitious project of collective creation: European Souvenirs.

All of us are afraid. We have arrived from our respective home-cities, with our knowledge, our expectations, our desires, our insecurities. Nuria García Atienza and me were in charge of coordinating the module entitled Structure, which, in a poetic manner, has the aim of “finding a South in order not to get lost”, playing with the Spanish idea that in order to orient oneself, one must always search for a “North”. During this first week of the five weeks of work which constitute the roadmap of project, we shared our weeks and work sessions with no less than Toni Serra, who left his mark on our point of view: after his visit, we never looked again at ideas such as “border” or “other” in the same way. Vivian, Rubén and Pedro are our hosts in the caS centre, which, during these days, becomes our home. In various rooms of the CaS centre we unleashed our projects, the traces of dynamics, our learnings: keywords, techniques, interchangeable self-portraits, souvenirs from our home cities, living archives, life stories, little sketches of what would be our cherished Minotaur when we manage to walk out of the city walls of Seville: a skeleton for the spectacle, the desired structure.

We eat together in the garden, and Pili’s incredible meals feed our drained brains, the sun fuels us with energy, we get to know each other and laughter modulates the agreements and disagreements, the pacts that configure the common code. We talk a lot, we learn to actively listen to each other (the ZEMOS98 methodology is in the air), we think together. This week is important. It was for me and for Nuria. Very intense, very exhausting, fully enjoyed. It also had its tensions, its moments of confusion, its necessary silences.

Sevilla Residency (cc) Pedro Jiménez

To break down the work we did: we had three work sessions on the technique of structure, with an eye always on ending the week with a minimum of agreement regarding what we wanted to narrate, and how. In the first session – where each producer turned into their own archive of memories and creator of a small piece of fiction on the basis of someone else’s archive – we explored the potential of one’s own biography as prime material for creation, and the need to get under the other’s skin in order to explore the different ideas of europe which where in play. The aim was to emphasise the idea that any subject matter to appear in the spectacle had to be one which criss-crossed the life of its creators. Subject matter that called on them as persons, that concerned and worried them. The microscopic and the private as a vaccine against the “grand themes” which don’t touch us in our everyday life, but which we are always tempted to engage when we have the opportunity to create. We wanted to make the grand words land in our own experience.// In the second session we invited two migrant friends (Alina – Lithuania – and León – Cameroun – ), to act as our living archives. We subjected them to a loveable observation and interrogation, which allowed us to tell their stories from the standpoint of our own languages, intertwined with their experiences. It was an emotional and intense day that put us closer to the idea of conflict. Personal, formal, technical, political, family conflict. The interest of any story is latent in the conflict in any story. That’s what we learned that day.

In the third and final session with put on our work overalls and rolled up our sleeves in order to recognise, name, and use the tools we had detected throughout the week. Concepts such as Plot, Point of View, Visibility or Timeline were laid out on the table at the service of all the work done during the intense previous days. And, indeed, it seems that we managed to create a tree, or, at least, its seed, a drawing, a silhouette, a little map to show us the way out of the labyrinth, a new door back in! We were no longer the same people who checked in in Seville a week earlier. We were a group of people who had found a compass, even if only a provisional one. Noriko, Fernando, Karol, Farah, Baris. The journey goes on.

Safe journey!