Buleria, 2015, Video Still
Ida y vuelta, un viaje sensorial
(Round trip, a sensory journey ) is the title of a multidisciplinary project by Ana Lessing Menjibar. It is a series of works by the artist that take themes from Flamenco styles as their starting points. Ida y Vuelta was exhibited as a solo show in 2016 at the Ateneo de Málaga, Spain. Videos of this project were screened in 2016 in several group shows in Berlin, Buenos Aires and Marseille and at the Instituto Cervantes Berlin in 2015.
This multidisciplinary project unites visual art with the original meanings of flamenco art, as a personal journey that develops between the visual, the dramatic and the dance inseparably, making the eye, the voice, the body and the rhythm converge. With each of her pieces, Ana Lessing Menjibar shows us the deepest messages of different flamenco styles, interpreting, sometimes with her own body, other times with borrowed bodies, her most personal meaning. In this way, the artist breaks down and visually represents the profound senses of 12 flamenco styles, in the form of video art, photography and installation, creating a series of fictional images - between the real, the tangible and the illusory - in which the artist unites her role as author, director and performer.
Selection of artworks:
Buleria
2015
Video, 7.48 min.
Concept, Direction & Video by Ana Lessing Menjibar
Costume by Silke Faber
Light by Thorsten Kosellek
Vocals by Bariton Martin Gerke
Performance by Mikala Hyldig Dal, Diana Römer Duque, Thorsten Kosellek, Kati Krause, Martin Gerke, Ana Lessing Menjibar.
The work’s title, Bulería, comes from a style of Flamenco which often it is performed in a circle at gatherings. Bulería, burlarse, to make fun. This Flamenco styles gives space to the performers to make fun of themselves. This video work takes our social media society ad absurdum, where one is expected to be alwayswhere advertising and promoting oneself, to exhibit one’s identity, to create one’s identity through exhibition.
Six performers pose, unmoving, in the space of an otherwise empty gallery, like items on display. At the sound of a camera’s shutter, each performer takes out a mobile phone and begins to film her- or himself. The group does not perform together, as an ensemble; rather each performs, as if privately, for themselves, via the intermediary of the phone, and the film itself is primarily structured as a montage of these individual recordings.
In this work, the performers show off, perform caricatured roles, enacting exaggerated embodiments of vanity, self-presentation, seduction, compulsion, and dependence. In this way, the performers simultaneously expose themselves and reduce themselves to a cliché. Playing up to their representation in the form of the images on their handheld devices, the performers neglect direct interactions with one another in favor of the imagined gaze of the observer on the other side of the screen. Only the artist herself plays the voyeur, filming the other performers as she moves among them.
Video Stills
Seguiriya (Photo)
2015
C-Print, 70 x 200 cm, Edition of 3 + 2 AP
Photography and Performance by Ana Lessing Menjibar Performer Arne Schönewald
This artwork adopts its name from Seguiriya which is an old flamenco music- and dance form dedicated to the death and pain in life – one of the deepest and most solemn dances.
Seguiriya (Video)
2015
3 Channel Video loop, 7.11 min
Performance & Video by Ana Lessing Menjibar
Seguiriya is a performance piece by the artist shown as a 7.11 min three channel video loop. In this piece, the artist explores the boundaries and relationship between body and time by using her own body to form a sculpture encased in a cocoon like skin. She stays in the body sculpture until she breaks down. This process repeats itself forwards and backwards in an infinite loop through a dissolution and recreation process. The breakdown is a deconstruction as well as a synthesis. A circle of autopoiesis. ad infinitum. A circle of birth, death and rebirth.
Video Stills
Seguiriya (Video-Installation)
Körperfragmentnotation
2015
6 channel video installation, 4.18 min.
Edition 6 + 2 AP
Performance & Video by Ana Lessing Menjibar
Voice Manuel Soto
This work was exhibited in Malaga, but also in the Instituto Cervantes Berlin in 2015. In this video installation, the artist examines her dancing body to the singing of Manuel Soto and created over 6 screens a notation to his Siguiriyas. Individual parts of the body, which otherwise remain hidden on stage, are the transmitter of the dance. In the new composition they form an independent vocal interpretation and choreography.
Tientos
2015
C-Print, 30 x 40 cm,Edition of 3 + 2 AP
Performance and phography by Ana Lessing Menjibar
Tientos is a flamenco style which addresses the themes of earth and air, longing and melancholy in its lyrics. Tientos is derived from the Spanish word tentar, which means to experience or to tempt.
Taranto
2015
C-Print, 70 cm x 80 cm, 90 cm x 100 cm, 80 cm x 70 cm
Photography by Ana Lessing Menjibar
Performance by Bella Paloma
Nana
2015
C-Print, 70 x 100 cm,
Edition of 3 + 2 AP
This photowork is based on a lyric from a Spanish lullaby, a nana, called „ La Nana Del Caballo Grande“ from Federico García Lorca (1898 – 1936).
Photography by Ana Lessing Menjibar
Performance by Mikala Hyldig Dal
Alegría
2015
Video, 1:32 min
Edition 6 + 2 AP
Concept, Video and Directed by Ana Lessing Menjibar
Performance by Leonor Leal
Alegría is a lively and joyful flamenco style and has some lyrics about the celebration of the expulsion of the French occupation (Napoleon Bonaparte) in the south of Spain. In this video work, the dancer Leonor Leal performs on a relict of a statue base; a leftover unfinished construction site of the Spanish financial crisis. The dancer shifts between famous poses of Bonapart and those of a classical flamenco dancer.
Video Stills
