Guggenheim Bilbao Museum Members take center stage in an unprecedented artistic action by the artist Cecilia Bengolea
Tonight, 25 October, the Guggenheim Bilbao Museum will be hosting a performance entitled Dance of Mutant Materialities, created by Argentine artist Cecilia Bengolea, in which more than 500 Museum Members will participate.
In the year of its 25th Anniversary, the Guggenheim Bilbao Museum is once again inviting its Members to take part in a collective artistic action as it has done for previous anniversaries with the artists Maider López, Juan Pérez Agirregoikoa and Esther Ferrer. The Museum would like to thank all its Members, a collective made up of more than 22,000 people, for the unconditional support they have shown over the years.
This artistic action, created especially for this occasion and designed for the Museum Atrium, evokes the memory of the building, its origins, and its future through a collective dance guided by Bengolea, four dancers and a DJ; an includes as well as a video installation that shows digital avatars interacting with the architecture of the Museum and some of the works of art.
The Atrium will be turned into a unique “dance floor” where Bengolea, dancers and Museum Members will dance to the beat of Dancehall, a Jamaican style of music with African and Caribbean roots. Once the action is over, participants will be free to wander around the different galleries of the Museum while DJ Pappy performs a set in the Atrium.
Cecilia Bengolea, an internationally renowned artist based in Paris, has used archival material of the building’s construction as well as recordings of the architecture and its materials as the background for the videos to be screened during the performance. In her studio, the artist and dancers scanned their bodies and rendered them as avatars or mutants, which gives the performance its name. In addition to these previously recorded images, a live device will record the collective dance performed by the Museum Members, who will also become digital avatars during the dance.
