Laia Estruch presents, at Azkuna Zentroa swimming pool, Crol (moll) as part of EszenAZ - the performing arts season - and also Kinu#9 - Resident Collectives Programme.
In Crol (moll), Laia explores water as a medium using a series of inflatable objects arranged in a pool whose shape recalls a chain. Some of the links have inscriptions on them as ships do. Ramona, Novena, Tralla and Soca are names linked to the artist’s biography floating entwined over the chlorinated water. These links form the score from where the action is triggered. During this performance we will see her swimming and interacting with the inflatables while she sings, accompanied by a soundtrack and a series of hydrophones amplifying both the sound of her body coming into contact with the inflatables and her voice exercises. In air, her voice echoes in her oral cavity to become present, therefore turning into an expression of unique interiority of each body. When submerged, on the other hand, this cavity fills with water. The throat closes thus forcing us to remain silent.
We use voice in our daily lives to convey messages to those around us. Similarly, we use it to occupy a space and to expel raw emotions for which we have no known words. Our voice breaks with pain and desire, becomes twisted with fear, while gasping with effort. We project our voice to reach distant elements with it. Depending on the physiognomy of our environment, our voice returns to us as an echo, something we have used as a spatial measuring system since we were children.
Laia has been using voice for over 10 years to formalise her artistic practice. In order to develop it, she creates sculptural elements with which she modulates her voice through physical interaction. Following in the line of Russian constructivism artists such as Ljuiba Popova, Laia creates stage elements straddling sculpture and instruments, with which she interacts physically. Therefore, it is no surprise that she often refers to her live performances as training sessions. Laia frequently refers to her personal life, memories and recollections and subjects them to operations of abstraction, fragmentation and recontextualisation. She has shown a growing interest in recent years in analysing the ways in which the most intimate dimension of existence is related to urban space and architecture. Crol (moll) was presented for the first and only time to the public in 2019 in the Olympic pool of Montjuic, Barcelona, as part of the Gira, Tot Gira cycle curated by Marc Navarro for Fundació Miró´s Espai 13.
For the 9th Kinu session, Laia has adapted the performance to the Azkuna Zentroa pool. Crol helps us expand, rethink or contrast those ideas we have assumed about the body, the subject and the urban environment. But it also introduces us to the plasticity of our voice to discover how enigmatic, strange and familiar it is to have one and use it. According to Kafka: “I write differently from the way I speak, I speak differently from the way I think, I think differently from the way I should think, and so on and so forth to the denizens of darkness.”
Description:
Creation and interpretation: Laia Estruch. Music production and sound design: Aleix Clavera. Underwater sound recordings: Xavi Lloses. License plate design: Sergio Ibáñez. Crol song text: Laia Estruch.