video - 'Whistling Past the Graveyard'

Alejandro Almanza Pereda
Whistling past the graveyard 2011 Video 8.31
Rove Gallery, Hoxton Square, London
13 May - 11 Jan 2011

A few things to note:
1. Torch's eye view - space in darkness is unfolded by the movement of a torch in hand of a person with unknown identity.
2. Story-telling by the trajectory of the torch for the constructed artefacts in the sequence.
3. Traces of the objects that tell the story of the unknown owner - lit, touched and rejected.
4. Spatial narrative manipulated by the intensity between the pitch black and the sound of heavy breathing - between the torch-scape and the sound-scape
5. 'Travelling across the US and Mexican border brought Almanza Pereda to explore a variety of situations of intense contrast and sensibility. One may describe such an apporach as an exploration of the safe and secure as opposed to the dangerous and unmasked through the use of precarious experimental assemblages with a poetic narrative.'

Story-telling II

Bologna - Pattern of the Gothic structutre, gradual progression of the scale

Morandi
- preparatory work in different medium becoming automous work upto smallest details / Relationship between Natura Morta & Paessaggio
- story-making of Museo Morandi interwoven with the life of Morandi in his home
- light and shadow creating a pattern that dissovles and distinguishes
- contours erased and emerging

Wayne Thieband
- extraordinary story of ordinary things
- unfamiliarise the everyday pieces
- beauty of banal things through decontextualisation using colours and textures

Venice
- tourism affecting urban experience, journey and design
- venetian legends and Ghost stories

Siena
- theatrical setting of the piazza with the slope and focal point, leading to the vertical tower, surrounded by the backdrop of local shops, alleys of in-between
- story of Palio, an anual event read and drawn in tourist guides, postcards that continuously affects the majority of the days when the Palio is absent
- museo de Piazza Campo, interweaving a spatial narrative through the contemporary insertion of bridges and slabs into the interlocking old brick arches
- why do we walk 505 steps of the tower? the appreciation of the varying heights providing changing perception of the scenery and roofscape
- relationshp between the height and the perception of angles, details, ranges, patterns similar to that between scale of and distance to notes.

Milan
- museo del Novecento: circulation of 20th century art, Art Povera, Informel, Archivism, Futurism, Kinetic Art, Conceptual art
- urban/architecture 1960-70 Italy to note