Distant Pairs: Carmen Baliero & Cecilia Lopez – AEROSILLA (el turismo posible)

FESCH.TV INFORMIERT:

Thursday, July 15th, ISSUE Project Room & Harvestworks are pleased to stream AEROSILLA (el turismo posible), a new collaborative work by New York-based composer, musician and multimedia artist Cecilia Lopez and Buenos Aires-based composer and performer Carmen Baliero. Both born in Buenos Aires, the pair have an expansive collaborative history that spans decades. The duo’s new work will stream on ISSUE’s site.

Carmen Baliero and Cecilia Lopez met around 1999 when, as a 16-year-old conservatory dropout, Lopez started taking composition classes with Baliero. The studies lasted, on-and-off, for about ten years and slowly morphed into a fruitful and long collaborative path. Lopez participated as a performer in Baliero’s pieces Ultimo Momento (Edited as a CD by Los Años Luz, 2002) and Maquinarias, a piece for 3 typewriters, premiered at Ciclo Escuchar, organized by Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Buenos Aires in 2012.

Lopez also participated as a performer and co-director for Baliero’s piece Bocinas, premiered at the FIBA Festival Internacional de Buenos Aires in 2009 and then presented as the opening act of the VII Mercosur Festival in 2009. That same year, Lopez was Baliero’s assistant for the creation and musical direction of the piece Marat Sade by Peter Weiss; premiered at Teatro Cultural San Martin and directed by Villanueva-Cosse. In 2010, Lopez participated as a performer and assistant director for Baliero in the film Cine Accidental, which premiered at TACEC at Teatro Argentino de La Plata. In 2013 Baliero was a performer in Lopez’s piece Música Mecánica para Chapas, presented as a live score for artist Carrie Schneider´s Burning House, at Sendrós Galería, in Buenos Aires. Despite numerous efforts, since Lopez moved to New York there has been a gap in the collaborative process. The commission of this piece, and the relativization of global and local distances due to the pandemic brought the opportunity to reconnect again.

This is the sixth year in an ongoing program collaboration between ISSUE Project Room and Harvestworks, two organizations that are committed to supporting the creation and presentation of experimental performance practices while sharing resources.

During the Summer 2021, ISSUE is commissioning artists to produce collaborative work at a time when the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has drastically impacted their ability to travel and perform, and altered the nature of collective work and performance. Pairing artists in disparate locations who cannot work together in “traditional” ways, the Distant Pairs series examines the collaborative process, methods of working, and partnership amidst these constrained conditions.