Helena Torres
29 October 2011 – 09 January 2012
With a degree in Political Science and a Master’s degree and research proficiency in Sociology, Helena Torres has developed identity studies from the perspective of critical social theory using, among others, the methodology of narrative productions (interviews that become stories). She has published essays on queer theory and a novel, Autopsia de una langosta (Melusina, 2009), a hybrid between essay and fiction. Since 2009 she has been running workshops on the re-signification of language, with which she began to investigate the potential of sound in public space.
In July 2011 she started Conversaciones improbables at Medialab Prado, a project of sound interpellations to passers-by in the public space, recording their responses and sound mapping. She has coordinated and designed projects to re-signify public space using visual culture, music, sport, new technologies and film. His latest work is Aproximació a la situació de l’homofòbia, la lesbofòbia i la transfòbia a Catalunya, published by the Generalitat de Catalunya in 2010.
Project in residence
Serendipia
Serendipia proposes the resolution of a crime that took place in Gijón at the end of the 19th century, with the aim of situating passers-by in the political, social and historical climate of the early modern period. The El Sucu cemetery has been chosen because its history spans the entire twentieth century: it was inaugurated in 1876 and, although it continues to be used for spaces that have already been allocated, no new spaces have been sold since 1999. The drifting through this space, configured by current traces of past events, would generate a historical point of view of the present, bringing us closer to stories of the origins and generating a personal interpretation of the present from a journey through time and space.
The narrative axis of the sound drift is the voice of Margarita Simona, a historian specialising in feminism who is writing a thesis on the figure of Rosario de Acuña.During her research, she discovers an unsolved crime that took place in Gijón in 1895.The murderer was Edgardo del Pozo, a symbolist painter protected by the Count of Goncourt, with whom she is said to have had a love affair. Del Pozo’s body was found in his mansion in Gijón by his fiancée, Gemma Oldman, a Catalan anarchist and defender of women’s rights. Through radio and newspaper reports, quotations, poetry, fragments of interviews, documents from the period and Margarita’s story, passers-by will experience a sound drift that proposes the articulation between past and present, presence and absence, reality and fiction.
Serendipia proposes an approach to narrative and history through attentive listening and the movement of the body through a space charged with historical symbols.
You can see the complete narrative with the audios in this link [+].
