FADO is pleased to present Barcelona-based artists Maria Cosmès and Carlos Piña in their Toronto premieres in the on-going International Visiting Artists series.

Maria Cosmès’ work focuses on the relationships, interpersonal relationships, links and ties with one another. Using rope, string, thread, rubber bands, Cosmès builds her performance in collaboration with the audience, each performance is informed by time, space and place. As an anthropologist, she is particularly interested in these differences, and at times, similarities.

In Liens Maria Cosmès acts as mediating interpreter allowing herself to be bound and handled by real ropes which end up forming an autonomous network in which our movements become ambivalent, longing to escape, soothe or submit, in short, they relive that everyday monster, sometimes pleasant or seductive, which at the bottom is the most terrible of all pitiful ghosts: society.

Deborah Puig-Pey

Carlos Piña’s current work is primarily concerned with memory, informed by a thoughtful observance that in order to prevent the suffering and war we have already lived through, one must preserve and be conscious of the ‘duty of memory’ we have to our children. Using the events of the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) and working with the concepts of amnesia and reminiscence, Pina’s work aims to investigate histories of power construction, truth, memory and collective silence. Believing that all historical events, though removed, are relatable of one owns concept of a personal history, Pina’s work attempts to slow down or put a stop to the gradual process of forgetfulness we all experience, both individually and as a society, caused by an overabundance of information from the mass media, a society in which the past is discarded in favour of the constant search for the new.

We live in societies in which the silence has been imposed, where the impunity has been established under the name of reconciliation, where the amnesia has been promoted so that the powerful do not have to ask for pardon for they did in the past. We are silenced persons, sons and grandchildren of silenced persons, generations plenty of silence. Ignoring the pain that our ancestors have suffered, we live as unknown and incomplete persons; we are, therefore, persons without past for the loss of our historical, family and cultural memory.

Carlos Piña

© Maria Cosmès, Untitled Performance, 2007. Photo Henry Chan.