PERFORMATIVE WRITING

The Performative Writing residency programme began in 2019 and continued in 2020 by means of a curatorial invitation to Violeta Gil, Helena Mariño and Cynthia Smart, who together form Una fiesta salvaje (A Wild Party), a project through which to explore the performative possibilities of language.

As part of their year-long research residency, they carried out an independent study programme within the framework of Matadero Critical Studies, in which they combined master classes by lecturers and practical workshops. Together with 25 participants they carried out exercises to experiment with the body and language, trying out different textualities in order to find new ways to relate it to their physicality.

They borrowed the name of the project, which implies the association of poetry with dance and the body, from Dorothea Lasky’s quote: “Real poetry is a party, a wild party, a party where anything can happen. A party you may never return home from”.

Una Fiesta Salvaje

Since the beginning of time, poetry has been associated with dance and the body; poetry, Dorothea Lasky tells us, is a wild party.

Una fiesta salvaje is a study, writing and research group focused on exploring the hybrid terrains of creation that have the body and the word at their core: every creative act that is on the edge, scrapes against the limits and puts its own centre in crisis. To inform this search, the collective works with a series of guest creators, thinkers and researchers. The encounters are documented in podcasts and diverse graphic and audiovisual materials. In this way, they form a residency archive that is open to the public, in which they draw maps, lines that lead from one place to another and help to think about creation from non-canonical places. During the course of the residency, they have talked with lawyers, architects, writers and publishers, choreographers, filmmakers, gynaecologists, musicians and academics. They have also explored the creation of their own texts and the translation of other people’s texts.

During the autumn the studio was opened to the public through the MEC (Matadero Critical Studies), with virtual visits by Jazmina Barrera, María

Bastarós, Tálata Rodríguez, Andrea Chapela and Hanif Abdurraqib and the presence of Elena López Riera. Topics that came up in the preceding conversation were discussed after the talks, and exercises were proposed, testing writing from sound, with sound, and through confessions, impersonations, inventions and collaborations. The generation of poetic texts intended to be performed was addressed. Some of the questions that guided the work during those months were: how to read, how to work with the body and the voice, what possible explorations exist in the field of performative poetry.

Faced with the isolation, loneliness and dissolution of the social fabric that latter-day capitalism is trying to impose, the collective is interested in art that generates spaces for exchange and encounter. They are interested in the concept of de-appropriationist literature, which uses language to question the distance between what is and what is not their own. Literature in which those who read relate to the text through bonds of belonging and not ownership.

Poetry may not save us, ma calma i nervi.

BIOGRAPHY

Violeta Gil (1983), Helena Mariño (1990) and Cynthia Smart (1979) met in Iowa City in 2016, where they were on a scholarship to study for a master’s degree in creative writing in Spanish at the University of Iowa. There they created the series of reading entitled Subtitled in Iowa City; learned to read each other, to be generous with each other’s work, and to understand that writing can also be a collective activity for which it is necessary to generate a specific context. They met up again in Madrid in 2019, where they began to think about ways of generating just such a context. Driven by their desire to think about writing in relation to the body, to leave the academic sphere behind and to generate their own canon, they set up Una fiesta salvaje.