The Reading Room #3 – Aparatos del habla y materialismo histœrico
The Reading Room is concerned with the unrestricted exploration of other forms of collective reading. The third session of this project presents an action situated between the boundaries of the open essay, micro-theatre, performance and sculptural installation, while also studying the idea of writing plays for the theatre as a medium. Through the reappropriation of Miran Božovič’s essay “The Omniscient Body”, which contains a wealth of narrative material, surrealist brushstrokes, the philosophy of materialism, veiled misogyny and indoctrination, and in which the theme of the acousmatic voice in Diderot’s first novel, Les bijoux indiscrets, and in Pythagorean legends is examined as the possible origin of the term, what is proposed is a deconstruction of meaning expressed through the action of two women drummers who embody two or three characters, a sculpture presented as an actor and a complete alteration of the idea of place that involves what is audible as representation and as fiction.
Eliana Beltrán (Medellín, Colombia, 1984) lives in Barcelona and is a long-term artist-in-residence at Hangar Centre for Artistic Research and Production (2016-2018). She did her master’s degree in sound art at the University of Barcelona Faculty of Fine Arts (2015-2017) and studied architecture at the Pontifical Bolivarian University in Medellín (2001-2006), where her end-of-course project was on the special subject of theory, critique and project. She is a drummer and taught herself how to play the drums while a member of experimental musical projects on the alternative scene in Colombia (2005-2014). She started to study at the music school of EAFIT University, focusing in particular on symphonic percussion (2012). At Hangar, she has been selected in the last two calls for applications for the Encura grant by the winning curators. Her work has been shown in group exhibitions in Medellín (at the 43rd National Art Salon, 2013) and in Barcelona (in the Zeppelin Festival, organised by the Chaos Orchestra at the CCCB, 2015). She has received a number of awards for her work as a professional architect, including an honorary mention at the 23rd Colombian Architecture Biennial (2012). Her recent spatial practices include various forms of production and they engage in reflection through ambits such as architecture, fiction and the ephemeral nature of audible things, in tension and/or juxtaposition with other forms of the idea of spatial elements and the body.
