Wrap, History and Syncope - Isabel de Naverán

"It may be that very tension that makes us wonder what it is that is moving the dance; who the dancer is; who they are dancing towards, who they dance for; who they are looking at when we applaud; or more correctly, who it is we are applauding at the end of each scene. These are questions I've asked myself. Because as we watch these dances unfold, we watch two bodies wrapped in one another, but also a third presence, as Pérez Royo has indicated. This presence is the wrapping itself."

18 July 1936, Bayonne. After hearing the news of the Fascist uprising, the Spanish dancer and bailaora Antonia Mercé y Luque, known as La Argentina, suffers a syncope and dies in fateful synchrony with the Second Republic. History, and the artist’s body, have been seized and broken by the event.
In close dialogue with images and historical documents, Isabel de Naverán pursues the reverberations of that shock and how it resonates with collective pain and artistic translations (by Federico García Lorca, Gertrude Stein, Kazuo Ohno and others). How does history affect and move through bodies? How do living bodies carry and pass on cultural legacy and collective memory? What do these complex movements reveal about the present? Wrap, History and Syncope is an affective journey that invites the reader into tracing and revisiting other bodies, to ultimately dance their difference and multiplicity for oneself.

Isabel de Naverán is a writer and researcher. Concern with the passage and use of time is the backbone of her work, which focuses on bodily transmission and the examination of the concept of historical time by way of ephemeral and fugitive practices. She holds a PhD in art from the University of the Basque Country.

Translation from Spanish: Toni Crabb
Graphic design by Michaël Bussaer

Varamo Press in the essay series Gestures, 2024
English
Softback, sewn perfect binding, 112 pages
110mm x 165mm