Intertidal Polyphonies
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Fullerton Hotel 5
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Partial view of the Fullerton Hotel with tall buildings behind it. River prominent.
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Fullerton Hotel 6
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River an city skyline looking toward the Esplanade Theatres on the Bay. Fullerton Hotel partially visible.
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Fullerton Hotel 7
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River and city skyline featuring the Esplanade Theatres on the Bay and The Float at Marina Bay.
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Granville Bridge 1
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Image of a sign on the bridge railing with False Creek area and Burrard Inlet in the background.
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Granville Bridge 2
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Image of the bridge railing with docked boats and city skyline in the background.
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Guadalupe Martinez Interview 1
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In this clip, Guadalupe Martinez discusses how her Argentinian roots intersect with her current residence in Vancouver through the coast. She talks about how she conceptualises the human body in relation to bodies of water, and how she wants her art to embody this embodied experience., Guadalupe Martinez: I’m Guadalupe Martinez. I’m a performance artist from Vancouver.
(0:05)
I always go back to the body, and in this case…for one, I was thinking about—I am from a city in Argentina, Buenos Aires, which is on the coast, so there’s a lot of politics around that as well, and I wanted to reflect about this mirroring between the coast where I’m from and the place where I’m now, thinking of the body as this hinge or axis that operates as like a mirror, mirroring of two places. Also, thinking about identity, that could potentially operate as a split, but also as a…perhaps, hopefully like integration around identity. The other thing that I was thinking about had to do with… there’s this really beautiful quote in one of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s writings that, the writing is “The Chiasm—The Intertwined,” and it was his last manuscript, and he quotes a passage from the poet Claudel that says something around that, “some blue in the sea is so blue that only blood could be more red,” and I love that line from that poem, that—I might be changing it a little bit. But it just speaks to me about so many things around perception and poetry, and also, in a way, about interpretation. And the coastline also is so tightly associated with narratives of colonialism and immigration and migration and diaspora and all of these different narratives.
(1:37)
Joanne Leow: How do you think it comes through in what you’re trying to do? Like so, what you’re speaking of just sounds so beautiful, especially that line by Merleau-Ponty, and I also think about that relation to saltwater and blood and bodies—
Guadalupe Martinez: Yeah, totally.
Joanne Leow: —we have saltwater in ourselves too, right, we have a particular kind of salinity. But how did you seek to sort of really embody and materialize all these really abstract ideas in the art that you’re doing?
(2:02)
Guadalupe Martinez: Yeah. I’ve been focusing on embodiment and I—it has become kind of like a device, in a way, to work with the idea that the body is a space where all of these different ideas and concepts converge, and that through action and performance, there’s like this active relationship to place and to subjects. Again, from phenomenology, this idea that there’s intersubjectivity, Merleau-Ponty speaks about the flesh as this space that is kind of like the meeting point between bodies, you know, and space, and that there’s a reciprocal relationship. So, I don’t necessarily like to talk about agency as much, because I still find that that’s quite dominant, in a way, but I really like the concept of touch, this sense in phenomenology that seeing and touching is the same thing. So, I’m really really interested in performance and performativity. And even though my work often has sculpture and installation, and I work with materials, with found objects a lot, because I see them as archival material that, you know, where histories are embedded, narratives are embedded. I work collecting materials from construction sites, demolition sites, garbage, debris, and through performative walks collecting things, through performative walks intervening space. I’m working a lot with pedagogy, so at the foreshore a lot of my work had to do with public programming where I invited different artists to participate in giving free workshops that were open to the public where we explored different techniques in movement, in performative walks, in the idea of like decolonizing the body. There were sort of dance presentations around the idea of like trade and the cycles in the tide and…so everything through the body, really, like it’s how I’m exploring and understanding and investigating that all of these concepts can be present.
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Guadalupe Martinez Interview 2
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Guadalupe Martinez talks about how both found objects and poetics function in her performance art. She explains that the title of her performances are integral components to the performance. She also emphasises that the found objects she uses have inherent meanings that bring a depth and clarity to her work and serve to create emotion connections., Joanne Leow: I think I have two, I guess, specific questions about your process, then. One to do, first, with the found objects. So this idea that you’re saying there’s a material archive in these that need to be tapped. So like, one, I’m really interested in the work with the seawater, but two, what is that process for you when you’re thinking about how to almost make the archive real for your audience, because when most people look at a piece of debris from a construction site or look at a glass of seawater, they’re just like, “meh, this is just a thing,” it’s a material thing, but obviously you see so much more.
(0:29)
Guadalupe Martinez: Yeah.
(0:30)
Joanne Leow: And so what is that process like, you know, drawing that realization or that revelation from people who are involved in your art?
(0:37)
Guadalupe Martinez: Actually, I think that I use text a lot in order to create those kinds of poetical connections, so often—one, like usually the title of my work is very important; I see it as an element in the work and the text that kind like of accompanies the work in many ways. Oftentimes, in my performances, there is text that, in some way, is being used as poetical devices to hint different concepts into those materials. I think in general it’s, it’s quite successful in igniting…so I see like there’s all of this meaning embedded in, in materials—from the kind of material that they’re made of, and the kinds of labours that are embedded in that material in terms of production. Whether it’s a piece of a building, or if it’s soil that has been excavated, there’s so much meaning around it. I feel like, in general, it has been successful, like, the reception. I sometimes tend to use humour quite a bit to create this parody around the tragedy (laughs) of the politics around space and materials, and all the bodies, because I think that working with materials that have been disposed or turned down, it’s also a way to use those signifiers to speak about the bodies that are being turned away or discarded and erased.
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Guadalupe Martinez Interview 3
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Guadalupe Martinez discusses her recent thoughts about embodiment, performance, and pedagogy. She asserts that embodied performance is a way to communicate a multiplicity of narratives in a single space that promotes a form of knowing more visceral than traditional / institutionalised learning., Joanne Leow: As an artist right now in Vancouver, what do you think are the most challenging, but also the most interesting things that you want to think through in terms of the waterfront development, in terms of the coastline, in terms of the crazy property market? What are some of the things that you’re thinking of as your role as an artist?
(0:17)
Guadalupe Martinez: I’m kind of becoming more and more obsessed with theories of performance and embodiment and the relationship between that and pedagogy. And when I say pedagogy, I don’t mean a formal framework for education in the institution, on the contrary. I’m really interested in embodiment and performance because I have this feeling that it’s kind of like this way to bleed into and through and be fluid when we speak about institutions. Being from South America, the relationship to the institution and the way they work is very different. They’re much more deteriorated and corrupted, and there’s so much inefficiency and lack of support and resources, but in a way that also allows for a lot of freedom in other ways, in terms of content and form, especially. So, here, where there’s so much regulation and control in many ways, I find that, for me, performance and embodiment have become this substance and space and territory where there’s a lot of allowance, and also, almost like invisible potential, I don’t know how to say, there’s so much that you can do that has an effect.
(1:38)
Joanne Leow: And I wonder whether it’s a question of temporality. Thinking about Vancouver as a kind of gentrifying, developing…time seems to be moving in one particular way. You were talking earlier about how here, there’s a sense of disorientation because everything that’s old keeps being renewed. So there’s this idea that there’s this forward cycle, but what you’re talking about with performance really strikes me. The fact that you were thinking about these little interventions, these little moments of spontaneity or things that you can’t—because the nature, when you talk about fluidity, the nature of performance is such that you really can’t—you don’t know what’s going to happen, how your audience is going to react, and how you’re going to be in that moment, so is that what you’re thinking of, or…?
(2:13)
Guadalupe Martinez: Yeah, I also think that the relationship to one’s identity, I think, is each person’s responsibility. But I do feel like performance, or just the body, proposes or invites a relationship to memory no matter what, and I think that that’s a really important element in my work, this relationship to memory in the sense that a lot of what we were talking about in terms of architecture and landscape has to do with history, right, and what are the histories that we understand and relate to. But there’s so many narratives that are not present, and those are personal and they’re collective, and I think that performance puts that in your face, in a way, and these spontaneous or less spontaneous interventions for me, have to do with that relationship to memory and to, and to narrative, like what has remained and what has been erased or vanished or been forgotten or…but in a way, in other cities where architecture is more permanent, those…you know, certain buildings, certain places operate as this kind of reminders, but here everything is kind of gone all the time. So I think that when the body’s present, you can’t erase those narratives.
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