Distant Pairs: Carmen Baliero & Cecilia Lopez - AEROSILLA (el turismo posible)

Thursday, July 15th, ISSUE Project Room & Harvestworks are pleased to stream AEROSILLA (el turismo posible), a new collaborative work by New York-based composer, musician and multimedia artist Cecilia Lopez and Buenos Aires-based composer and performer Carmen Baliero. Both born in Buenos Aires, the pair have an expansive collaborative history that spans decades. The duo’s new work will stream on ISSUE’s site.

Carmen Baliero and Cecilia Lopez met around 1999 when, as a 16-year-old conservatory dropout, Lopez started taking composition classes with Baliero. The studies lasted, on-and-off, for about ten years and slowly morphed into a fruitful and long collaborative path. Lopez participated as a performer in Baliero’s pieces Ultimo Momento (Edited as a CD by Los Años Luz, 2002) and Maquinarias, a piece for 3 typewriters, premiered at Ciclo Escuchar, organized by Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Buenos Aires in 2012.

Lopez also participated as a performer and co-director for Baliero’s piece Bocinas, premiered at the FIBA Festival Internacional de Buenos Aires in 2009 and then presented as the opening act of the VII Mercosur Festival in 2009. That same year, Lopez was Baliero’s assistant for the creation and musical direction of the piece Marat Sade by Peter Weiss; premiered at Teatro Cultural San Martin and directed by Villanueva-Cosse. In 2010, Lopez participated as a performer and assistant director for Baliero in the film Cine Accidental, which premiered at TACEC at Teatro Argentino de La Plata. In 2013 Baliero was a performer in Lopez's piece Música Mecánica para Chapas, presented as a live score for artist Carrie Schneider´s Burning House, at Sendrós Galería, in Buenos Aires. Despite numerous efforts, since Lopez moved to New York there has been a gap in the collaborative process. The commission of this piece, and the relativization of global and local distances due to the pandemic brought the opportunity to reconnect again.

This is the sixth year in an ongoing program collaboration between ISSUE Project Room and Harvestworks, two organizations that are committed to supporting the creation and presentation of experimental performance practices while sharing resources.

During the Summer 2021, ISSUE is commissioning artists to produce collaborative work at a time when the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has drastically impacted their ability to travel and perform, and altered the nature of collective work and performance. Pairing artists in disparate locations who cannot work together in “traditional” ways, the Distant Pairs series examines the collaborative process, methods of working, and partnership amidst these constrained conditions.

Notes from Cecilia Lopez & Carmen Baliero on AEROSILLA (el turismo posible)

Aerosilla is an exercise about possible ways of travelling the world in extremely constrained conditions.

“Distance” is the subject of the piece; distance between the collaborators, distance between the places that we can’t reach and distance with the audience. We look closely, almost short-sighted, at two-dimensional landscapes and imagine being there, entering them, trying to travel, listen and look around. Sound and music are used to create a theatrical narrative that brings time and dimension to what otherwise would be static images.

Turismo, una costumbre de clase. The postcards, selected from a random household collection, function as a map and a testimony of a family’s travel choices. Distance, beyond linear space, entails difference, disparity, parallel and synchronic realities. It’s summer in New York; it’s winter in Buenos Aires. It’s winter in Buenos Aires and summer in New York. Things are better here and worse there, worse there and better here.

Born in Buenos Aires in 1962, Carmen Baliero is at the same time a composer and performer of experimental and popular music. She is a renowned composer for film and theater, a discipline that she has developed actively since 1990, having written more than 20 works. She has taught classes in composition, music for theater, and the use of voice in theater, for more than two decades. She has also led workshops across Argentina and Latin America.Her theater works include La Srta. Julia, by Strinberg, directed by Cristina Banegas (2016), Esplendor directed by Gustavo Tarrío (2015), Cómo vuelvo directed by Diego Lerman (2015), Molly Bloom, from James Joyce’s Ulysses, directed by Carmen Baliero and performed by Cristina Banegas (2012 ), Yo en el futuro, directed by Federico León (2009), Quién le teme a Virginia Wolf, directed by Luciano Suardi (2006), El niño argentino, directed by Mauricio Kartún (2006), La malasangre, by Griselda Gambaro, directed by Laura Yusem (2005), Mil quinientos metros sobre el nivel de Jack, by Federico León (1999), El pecado que no se puede nombrar, directed by Ricardo Bartis (1998). She has also composed original music for film and dance. She was awarded the prizes Florencio Sánchez and Trinidad Guevara for the music of El niño argentino, directed by Mauricio Kartún (2007). She was awarded the ACE prize for the music of Quién le teme a Virginia Woolf directed by Luciano Suardi (2006).

As a composer and performer she has participated in series and concerts at the Centro Cultural Recoleta (Buenos Aires, AR), Teatro Parakultural (Buenos Aires, AR), Centro de Experimentación del Teatro Colón (Buenos Aires, AR), Festival Internacional de Teatro de Buenos Aires (AR), Festival Internacional del Mercosur (Cordoba, AR), Teatro Margarita Xirgu (Buenos Aires, AR), Teatro General San Martín (Buenos Aires, AR), Buenos Aires en Porto Alegre Festival (Porto Allegre, Brazil) among many others. In 2019, she presented her piece Pianos (for live and prerecorded pianos) at Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires.Her discography includes, among others, Carmen Baliero Varieté (1992), Carmen Baliero (2000), Ultimo momento II – Máquinas (2001), Dame Más (2004), Te Mataría (2007), Centécimas del Alma – based on a text by Violeta Parra (2015) and Lentamente (2021). She is the author of the book Música para teatro y otros temas, commissioned by the Instituto Nacional de Teatro (2016) and La enseñanza musical y otros temas (2021).

Cecilia Lopez is a composer, musician and multimedia artist from Buenos Aires, Argentina currently based in New York. She works across the media of composition, video, installation and the creation of sound devices and systems. Lopez holds an MFA from the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, Bard College and an MA from Wesleyan University in composition (2016). Her work has been performed and exhibited at Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires (Argentina), Center for Contemporary Arts (Vilnius, Lithuania), Roulette Intermedium (NY), Issue Project Room (NY), Ostrava Days Festival 2011 (Ostrava, Czech Republic), MATA Festival 2012 (NY), Experimental Intermedia (NY), Fridman Gallery (NY), The Kitchen (NY), Kunstnernes Hus (Oslo, Norway) and the XIV Cuenca Biennial (Cuenca, Ecuador), among others. She was a Civitella Ranieri fellow in 2015 and has participated in various international residency programs such as Ostrava Institute, Roulette Intermedium, Harvestworks, among others. In 2019, Lopez curated the Intermedia festival Folly Systems co-produced by Roulette Intermedium and Outpost Artists Resources that featured 11 international artists. Collaborators include Carmen Baliero, Aki Onda, Brandon Lopez, John Driscoll, Carrie Schneider and Lars Laumann among others.

Full Distant Pairs Series Schedule*

Sofia Jernberg & Tomeka Reid: Wednesday, July 7th
Rob Thorne & Raven Chacon: Thursday, July 8th
Viola Yip & Laetitia Sonami: Wednesday, July 14th (Co-presented with Harvestworks)
Cecilia Lopez & Carmen Baliero: Thursday, July 15th (Co-presented with Harvestworks)
Louis Carnell & Okkyung Lee: Wednesday, July 21st
Rashad Becker & FUJI||||||||||TA: Thursday, July 22nd (Co-presented with AvanTokyo)**

*All Times 8pm ET