Descripción de la Exposición
Join us to celebrate the communities of Miami with ‘Tide by Side’, an artistic processional performance directed by Claire Tancons, in collaboration with Arto Lindsay and Gia Wolff for the Grand Opening of Faena Forum Faena Miami Beach. Artists include Carlos Betancourt, Carnival Arts, Los Carpinteros, Miralda and Marinella Senatore, with a special guest appearance by Ernesto Neto. And more than 30 Miami-based cultural groups.
Building upon parades, carnivals, and other public ceremonials from across the Americas and the Caribbean, Tide by Side inaugurates the Faena District Miami Beach with new commissions and American premieres of works by an international cast of artists and performers. The outcome of a two-year collaboration on an unprecedented district- and city-wide scale, with more than 30 South Florida cultural institutions and hundreds of participants, Tide by Side takes the form of a processional performance that provides a framework for a collective celebration of, and reflection on community and creation.
Drawn together by a mutual interest in the politics and aesthetics of parades, my co-directors Gia Wolff and Arto Lindsay and myself have devised an evolutive dispositive for the performance throughout the West side of the District, between Indian Creek Drive and Collins Avenue, revolving around the iconic new OMA / Rem Koolhaas / Sho Shigematsu buildings, in and out, on, off and around the Faena Forum, Faena Bazaar and Faena Park, instilling a double processional motion within and without the works, among performers and audience members alike, as in a carousel. Distributed throughout the four blocks of the district, Wolff’s intervention consists in inserting a set of elements in the raw aesthetics of road work equipment that double up as risers and bleachers for audience seating, thus setting navigational challenges on a parade route composed in equal part of the plazas designed by Raymond Jungles and two of the three lanes of Collins Avenue, Miami’s major northbound artery, forcing an otherwise linear flow to contort, and inviting rotating segments of the public, otherwise watching from the sidewalks and squares, to occupy the road and experience the parade from within, in closer interaction with the performers. In reminding us of the reality principle of traffic of which Collins Avenue was purposefully, if only partially, cleared to hold the parade, Wolff’s forces us to reflect upon the mutual accommodations necessary for the enjoyment, if temporary, of the integrated artistic and civic proposition that is Tide by Side. In like fashion, Lindsay’s soundscape introduces dissonances to the expected sonic accompaniment of a parade by way of digitally enhanced riffs on live renditions of old and new tunes from musicians ranging from conch-shell players led by father and daughter Alfredo and Yuridia Martinez of Ameyal Mexican Cultural Organization, the Rara Lakay rah-rah band under the direction of Benjamin Martineau, 305 Street Band marching band directed by Michael Randle, the classical and pop choir Nu Deco Ensemble directed by Sam Hyken as well as a steel-drum group, in collaboration with the Tide by Side artists and composers, creating a meta-melody, quite literally unheard of.
Setting off the festivities is Carlos Betancourt’s The Pelican Passage, a monumental piñata fitted with fifty-feet long multicolor ribbons (the festive game popular in Spanish-speaking communities), that invites large-scale participation under its imposing frame. A testament to Betancourt’s Cuban and Puerto Rican experiences, the participatory sculpture is a gesture toward the power of inclusion and the pleasures of belonging through common action. More powerfully yet, as a mythical figure associated with the spirit world, the tutelary pelican with which the float-like sculpture is topped confers a spiritual resonance to the life cycle initiated with the opening of the new cultural institution.
Los Carpinteros present their first rendition of Conga Irreversible in the United States, a Cuban conga performed in reverse, upended expectations associated with the dance and musical traditions of the genre. Reinterpreted through a musical arrangement by Latin Jazz musician and composer, and Harvard Jazz Band Director Yosvany Terry, choreography by Isaias Ramírez of Compaña Folklórica Ban-Rarra assisted by Yaselis Sánchez Correa, and costume design by Abraham García of Havana’s Tropicana nightclub fame, the backward motion of this retro-conga, first presented during La Bienal de La Habana in 2012, seemed a timely metaphor for the movement of the Caribbean country—and some would say, of this country as well. Displaced to Miami Beach and expanded upon with a cast in part made up from the original Cuban dancers and performers and in part drawn from Miami’s Cuban-American community, the retro-conga highlights the workings of cultural translation in relationship to political change, a year after the reopening of diplomatic relations between Cuba and the United States.
The Last Ingredients by Miralda is a mobile feast of commanding proportions that puts culinary traditions and cultural tastes into historical perspective. A vehicular processional, it is primarily comprised of food trucks, luncheras and ambulantes, the mobile kitchens and restaurants commonly spotted in Miami, and also features uncommon carriages like…a limousine-drawn barbecue. The processional’s centerpiece however, are seven of South Florida’s historic staples—palm cabbage, maize (corn), ananas (pineapple), boniato (sweet potato), alligator, turkey and conch—the likenesses of which are represented in a monumental multi-part sculptural formation carried by an ensemble of performers while the actual ingredients are reimagined into experimental menus composed by teams of renown Miami restaurant and hotel chefs such as Jeff McInnis and Janine Booth of the Sarsaparilla Club, Bradley Kilgore of Alter—as well as the Faena Hotel's very own Francis Mallmann of Los Fuegos and Paul Qui of Pao—and food truck chefs Alfred Montero of Mr. Good Stuff, Brett Chiavari of BC Monster, Connie Lee of Inspir Asian, and many others. As global haute cuisine integrates native ingredients and mixes with fusion street food thanks to the baroque culinary imaginary of Miralda, The Last Ingredients provide a taste of the utopian, Miamian dream of a melting pot.
Marinella Senatore presents the second and to date largest iteration, in the United States, of her ongoing performative pedagogical platform, The School of Narrative Dance, a multidisciplinary nomadic school that strives to harness the emancipatory power of communal creative processes. Theatrically staged throughout the upper and lower levels of the District’s architectural icons along Collins Avenue and set into motion by the city’s myriad artistic communities and social organizations headed by Miami-based dancer and choreographer Jojo Vela, the Miami Beach School of Narrative Dance will feature cultural formations fostered by the new art district.
Under the artistic direction of Celeste Fraser Delgado and Damián Rojo, in collaboration with musical director Brian Potts, Carnival Arts’s Siren Song is a tongue-in-cheek take on the meaning of luxury as imagined by youths and students from diverse backgrounds through African diasporic cultural traditions including Kongo Yoruba and Ibo rhythmic patterns and visual aesthetics. Developed throughout 2015–2016 during workshops held primarily with Miami Bridge Homestead, PACE Center for Girls, Thomas Jefferson Middle School and Barry University and led by a wide array of leading art practitioners from Miami’s extensive cultural communities including dancer and choreographer Marisol Blanco, singer Ketli and musician Arelan Torres, the three-section work—a small processional of its own borrowing from —transforms the Haitian folk character La Sirène into a contemporary figure imbued with self-affirming powers exemplary of multicultural formations thrust into the maelstrom of societal change.
Lastly, Ernesto Neto will present a new version of Jibóia, the open-form, multi-performer, snake-like wearable net that is as much a warning of the perils of climate change as it is a homage to the potency of conscious action in countering its effects. A timely intervention, Jibóia, will appear in flashes, streaming sideways through the main processional flow at various intervals, like the very flashes of consciousness that seize ever greater segments of society regarding this issue. First performed during the Global Climate March in Vienna in 2015, Jibóia is presented courtesy of Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary.
Engaging with the poetics of urban space and the experience of everyday city life along Miami Beach’s most vital artery, Tide by Side updates the tradition of the processional performance as an artistic practice and form of public address with mass appeal for the 21st century. It not only celebrates the opening of Miami’s newest cultural district with people, food, and music; it also ponders the importance of cultural communities amidst new urban developments and tests the conditions for the formation of new constituencies, tide after tide, side by side.
— CLAIRE TANCONS
MEET THE TEAM
Claire Tancons, Artistic Director
Claire Tancons practices curating as an expanded creative field and experiments with the political aesthetics of walking, marching, second lining, masquerading and parading in participatory processional performances. She has curated for established and emerging international biennials including Prospect New Orleans; the Gwangju Biennale; the Cape Town Biennial; Biennale Bénin; and the Göteborg Biennial, and was a guest curator for the BMW Tate Live Series at Tate Modern. She initiated a multi-year cross-Caribbean project on the intersection between Carnival and performance for Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans and Independent Curators International, which received an Emily Hall Tremaine Exhibition Award.
Sep 24, 2015
ARTO LINDSAY, musical director
Arto has stood at the intersection of music and art for more than four decades. As a member of DNA, he contributed to the foundation of No Wave. As bandleader for the Ambitious Lovers he developed an intensely subversive pop music, a hybrid of American and Brazilian styles. Throughout his career, Lindsay has collaborated with both visual and musical artists, including Vito Acconci, Laurie Anderson, Animal Collective, Matthew Barney, Caetano Veloso and Rirkrit Tiravanija.Having been involved with carnaval in Brazil for many years in 2004 he began making parades.
Sep 24, 2015
GIA WOLFF, ARCHITECTURAL DIRECTOR
Gia is an architectural designer who has always been compelled by the workings of performance and its use of space and objects to convey narrative, form, and emotion. She is interested in architecture that embodies a reciprocal relationship between the user and the built environment and questions the performative aspects of the discipline. In 2013, Wolff was winner of the Wheelwright Prize (Harvard GSD) for her project, Floating City: The Community-Based Architecture of Parade Floats, where she currently studies the traditions of parade floats—elaborate temporary and mobile constructions that are realized annually in various carnivals and festivals around the world.
Sep 24, 2015
THE ARTISTS
CARLOS BETANCOURT (b. 1966, Puerto Rico) engages with issues of memory while also questioning matters of beauty, identity, and communication. He explores the kaleidoscope of Caribbean and American culture by recycling and reinterpreting in the past in fresh contexts. Since the early 1980s, Betancourt has been a linchpin of the Miami art scene as a cofounder of 801 Projects and his own influential studio, Imperfect Utopia. His artworks are held by numerous museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York; the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C.; the Pérez Art Museum in Miami; the Bass Museum of Art in Miami Beach; the New Orleans Art Museum; the Museo de Arte Ponce in Puerto Rico; and the Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno in the Canary Islands, among others. A monograph, Imperfect Utopia, was published in 2015 by Skira/Rizzoli, and Recollections, a midcareer retrospective, was recently exhibited at Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico.
MIRALDA (b. 1942, Spain) has been harnessing the power of food through research and rituals for over five decades. Invested in the ethnology and sociology of food as much as its taste and aesthetics, Miralda produces large-scale, participatory events and other gatherings that summon up visions of a world long thought to have been lost to more communal times. The most emblematic project in this respect is his Food Culture Museum, a “museum without walls” that stages events and explores social practices through food. His work has been presented in Documenta; at the Venice, São Paulo, and Istanbul biennials; and has been the topic of numerous museum exhibitions, including a 2010 retrospective at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid. Madeinusa, an upcoming exhibition at the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, explores his collaborative methodology throughout the span of his American projects, of which Miami Global Banquet is the latest.
LOS CARPINTEROS Marco Antonio Castillo Valdes (b. 1971, Cuba) and Dagoberto Rodríguez Sánchez (b. 1969, Cuba) together form the collective Los Carpinteros. Contrary to the implications of their name, their artwork spans the intriguing and ambiguous space between conceptualism, activism, and formalism with monumental sculptural and architectural constructions. Works by Los Carpinteros are part of the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Museo de Bellas Artes in Havana, the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, the Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary Foundation in Vienna, and the Centro Cultural de Arte Contemporáneo in Mexico City. Their commissioned installations are featured at institutions around the world; the most recent, The Globe—a latticed beechwood structure inspired by Enlightenment illustrations—opened at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London in December 2015.
MARINELLA SENATORE (b. 1977, Italy) has been trained in music, fine arts, and film. She has embraced various modes of public participation in expansive works—the most notable being the filmopera Rosas (2012) and The School of Narrative Dance (2013–ongoing), an itinerant open school that has resulted in a variety of participatory projects in Europe and the United States, including lectures, screenings, and performances. Over the last five years, Senatore’s work has been featured in the Venice, Göteborg, Liverpool, Athens, Thessaloniki, and Lyon biennials. In 2017 her work will be the subject of solo exhibitions at the Queens Museum, New York; Trondheim Kunstmuseum; and Kunstraum Innsbruck.
CARNIVAL ARTS Since its inception in 2007, Carnival Arts has developed arts learning for youth in crisis through the carnival traditions of the Americas. A program of Barry University in partnership with Miami Bridge Youth and Family Services, Thomas Jefferson Middle School, Gang Alternative, City of North Miami Library, PACE Center for Girls, and St. Mary’s Cathedral School, among others, the organization provides drumming, dance, and mask making workshops led by professional artists, many of whom hail from or have extensive knowledge of the Caribbean and Latin American diaspora. Carnival Arts founder and director Dr. Celeste Fraser Delgado, is a Professor of English and Humanities at Barry University specializing in Caribbean and Latin American music and dance with over 25 years’ experience in the field of participatory community arts. Carnival Arts’ creative director Damián Rojo is a Cuban-born visual artist, art director, set designer and event producer Together, Delgado and Rojo co-produced two Carnival Arts exhibits at mia galleries, the art gallery of the Miami International Airport’s South Terminal: Carnival Arts: Celebration and Transformation, a retrospective, in 2013, and Bel Kongo: Beauty, Identity, Power, earlier this year.
Exposición. 19 nov de 2024 - 02 mar de 2025 / Museo Nacional del Prado / Madrid, España
Formación. 23 nov de 2024 - 29 nov de 2024 / Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (MNCARS) / Madrid, España