Individual residencies / Olot
CAROLINA MARTÍNEZ-LÓPEZ
From Tuesday, 21 November 2023 to Friday, 1 December 2023
Bio
Carolina Martínez-López is a tenured professor of the degrees in Performing Arts and Audiovisual and Multimedia Communication at the University of Girona (ERAM), and programmer of the Valladolid International Film Festival (SEMINCI). PhD in Fine Arts from the University of Castilla-La Mancha, her lines of research revolve around an expanded vision of cinema, choreography, scene and the uses of the body, from an experimental and documentary perspective. She is the editor and translator of "El Universo Dereniano. Textos fundamentales de la cineasta Maya Deren" (2015 and 2020), and she is one of the authors in the three volumes of the "Historia de la Danza Contemporánea en España" (2019-2021), coordinated by the Academia de las Artes Escénicas, of which she is a member. She is the author of the experimental poetry books "escribir y respirar" (2020) and "el punto ciego del paisaje" (2021), published by Salvoconducto books, a project of which she is co-founder.
Project
"El sol del invierno" is a poetic monologue in four acts set in the ruins of capitalism, which starts from Joseph Campbell's “The Hero's Journey”, and contains echoes of the playwright Heiner Müller and the poetess Emily Dickinson. It is a journey into the abyss of the pain of memory, flesh and word, from which, unexpectedly, sparkles appear that point to possible redemptions. The writing is overflowing and, after passing through my body, it questions itself in an almost cinematographic game of assembly and disassembly. This phase of deconstruction and reconstruction is what I will work on in Faberllull.
To arrive at Faberllull Olot on 21 November 2023 was to arrive in a frozen space-time brought to a standstill, an atmosphere of frozen light surrounded by fog and framed by volcanoes. When I arrived at night by bus in the region of Olot (after having glimpsed the magic of Besalú through the window like a spectral apparition), and when I got off, I already felt that I was entering a new universe that it would indelibly mark a stage in my life and in my artistic career.
I arrived saturated, contaminated by the "real" world, overwhelmed by empty stimuli and constant external demands that nowadays are always disguised as urgency. The first two days I had a hard time letting go of that external and mostly banal reality that, unfortunately, builds us up and erases us at the same time. However, little by little, I went deeper, accompanied by the impressive exterior landscape and its choreography (I don't think any of the residents will forget the dance of leaves on the second day, and it permeated us), in my inner landscape: the landscape of el sol de invierno (the winter sun). A text that entered Faber as a blurred poetic monologue and came out as a first version of a theatrical device with different voices, thanks to the mechanisms of composition that I found, by intuition and also encouraged by some colleagues.
There were days when we magically made tons of progress at work. Others that seemed null or useless. And others in which we ended up exhausted by descending into our own abyss and the abyss of writing. And I express myself in the plural because, curiously, we all or almost all experienced the same cycle of experiences, which we shared every night from 8 pm during dinner, where Emilio attended to us warmly.
In my case, and due to the characteristics of the material I had on my hands and my personal situation – both linked – at various times I wandered around the shadow area, intensely. I tore myself up inside, and I tore up the writing. But I always felt protected by the forests and the sun of Olot; by Pepa and the other residents, who (even if they didn't know it) accompanied me to find this way out of Hades that closes my text, a never-ending hero's journey.
I left Olot profoundly changed, transformed; full of golden and powerful light, like the one that flooded the hotel reception in the mornings. We all left changed, transformed. And with our babies just born or about to be born under our arms.
(Though I don't think we actually left; in reality, we're all still there, in that frozen space-time, dancing with the leaves, in the middle of the volcanoes.)
