4 JUNE 2016

Carlos Motta
Requiem

CHAPEL   H 19.30
Mondo Invertito
Carlos Motta, Andrea Ropes and Stefano Laforgia

OUTSIDE SPACES OF TENUTA DELLO SCOMPIGLIO   H 19.30
Libera Me
featuring Ernesto Tomasini

Carlos Motta  Mondo invertito, 2016

Requiem is a performance in two acts that will subsequently develop.

Requiem is based on a queer interpretation of the stories of the death and resurrection of Christ in an attempt to question their effect on the sustained exclusion of queer bodies and lives. The performances, which will also be filmed, will premiere as a three-channel installation on October 14th 2016 as part of Carlos Motta: Requiem, Motta’s solo exhibition at MALBA in Buenos Aires.
    
1_Libera Me is vocal performance of Libera Me from Gabriel Fauré’s Requiem (1886-7), by famed Italian singer Ernesto Tomasini. Tomasini is an iconoclast and eclectic artist, who moves with ease between classical theatre and performance and between contemporary music and alternative cabaret. Its rare and powerful singing extension of 4 octaves, will sing in the artist’s unmistakable style, characterized by a deliberately redundant gestures and ostentatiously queer.

2_Mondo Invertito is a performative act where two men tie the artist down from his feet, elevate and invert him. This thirty-minute inversion is informed by the BDSM practices of inversion and crucifixion and it is also in conversation with the queer theological work of Marcella Althaus-Reid (1952 – 2009), who used sexual stories to rethink the dialectics of decency and indecency from perspectives that have mostly been rendered marginal. The naked body hanging upside down may (literally) evoke the reversal of a normative world-view. The body of the ‘invert’ is equated here to the (sexualized) body of Christ.
The performance is an iconographic intervention that is both delicate and forceful and aims at reclaiming the body from reductive discourses of immorality and perversion. The performance is formally based on Caravaggio’s and Guido Reni’s paintings The Crucifixion of St. Peter.

suitable for an adult audience only

The work of Carlos Motta (Bogota 1978, lives and works in New York), has been exhibited in a number of European and American museums, among the others: Tate Modern, London; New Museum, Guggenheim Museum and MoMA / PS1 Contemporary Art Center, New York; Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; Museo de Arte del Banco de la República, Bogota; Museu Serralves, Porto; Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona; National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens; Castello di Rivoli, Turin; CCS Bard Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-on- Hudson; San Francisco Art Institute; Hebbel am Ufer, Berlin; Witte de With, Rotterdam; Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros, Mexico City; and many others public, private and independent spaces around the world. He won the prestigious Future Generation Art Prize (2014).

Ernesto Tomasini played lead roles with experimental theatre companies (Lindsay Kemp), in Off-West End productions and on the West End. He went on to create his own shows to critical acclaim. On radio he has sung, acted and was interviewed on all the BBC stations, Classic FM and on national channels around the world; most notably on Radio 3 (Spain), RAI Radio 3 (Italy) and Radio New Zealand. Tomasini boasts collaborations with the late “father of industrial music” Peter Christopherson (founder of Coil, Psychic TV, Throbbing Gristle), Julia Kent (Antony & the Johnsons), Andrew Liles (Nurse With Wound) and Current 93. As soloist he has sung his repertoire in London venues like the Royal Albert Hall, National Theatre, Tate Britain, National Portrait Gallery, and in historical theatres around the world.

Carlos Motta