Residence: Helena Torres
'Serendipity' uses the detective genre to suggest an investigation focusing on the city of Gijón, appropiating some elements from the past.
Serendipity proposes to solve a crime that took place in Gijon in the late nineteenth century, with the goal of putting strollers in the political, social and historical climate of the beginnings of modernity. The chosen place is the cemetery of El Sucu because its history spans to the twentieth century: it was opened in 1876 and although it is still used for space already allocated, new positions are not sold anymore since 1999. The drift in this space, configured for current traces of past events, create a historical view of the present, approaching the origin stories and creating a personal interpretation of the present time from a walk through time and space.
The sound drift narrative axis is Simona Margarita's voice, a historian specialized in feminism that makes a thesis on the figure of Rosario de Acuña. During her investigation, she discovers an unsolved crime happened in Gijon in 1895. This is Edgardo del Pozo, symbolist painter protected by the Count of Goncourt, with whom it is said ha has a loving relationship. Del Pozo's body is found in his mansion in Gijón by his fiancee, Gemma Oldman, Catalan anarchist advocate for women's rights. Through radio and newspaper news, quotes, poems, excerpts from interviews, documents of the era and the story of Margarita, walkers would experience a drift soundtrack that proposes a link between past and present, presence and absence, reality and fiction.
Serendipity proposes an approach to narrative and history from listening and body movement though a space full of historical symbols.