CUERPOS CELESTES/HEAVENLY BODIES
a documentary project of science and fiction.

In this residency AZKONATOLOZA will continue researching their new piece CUERPOS CELESTES, the second part of FALLA, a new series of live arts research projects by these two artists.

After eight years travelling around Abya Yala with our Trilogía Pacífico, tracing the cracks left by colonialism and capitalist barbarism on the life of the planet, delving into the consequences of unregulated extraction and the geopolitical relationships that underpin all this, our questions were piling up:

Now what? Where are we headed?
What surface should we scour?
Which voices should we listen to?

The first clue was to be found in the last verse of Teatro Amazonas: “Now, what we have to do is stop and listen.”

Listening was the starting point for the new journey we embarked on with Canto Mineral, the opening piece of FALLA, the series of documentary research, speculative reality and science fiction that we are currently involved in. Because after years giving our attention to human stories and voices, who should we listen to now?

What if it wasn’t the humans, or the animals, or even the trees that would have the last word, as Joan Brossa wrote? What if it was the stones, the minerals or the electromagnetic waves?

And that is the essence of our project: sidelining the human element and putting the mineral centre stage. Listening to how our voices dialogue with the crunch of stones and the frequencies of satellite movements.

The hierarchy of the classification of nature, that puts the mineral at the extreme opposite end, beneath the human, leads to an uncontrolled exploitation of the mineral resources of the planet and the celestial bodies. Mineral barbarity. In the midst of this climate crisis, would it not help to recognise that carbon is the basis of life? Or that calcium, phosphorous and potasium are only three of the fourteen minerals essential for the human body to function?

Can we claim, without fear of error, that geological systems are not alive? And that the stars and planets that orbit around us are not alive either?

Are we prepared to watch how magma turns into blood? How our bodies turn to rock?

A rock that never ceases vibrating, creaking and cracking.
A hard rock that never stops dancing, in the midst of its fear.

We are not only talking about stones, rocks or mountains, but also about rivers, lakes and seas, planets and asteroids.