ORBIS | LA BATALLA DE NANCY

 

Orbis | La Batalla de Nancy. A dark composition by Francisco Tomsich. EAC (Contemporary Art Space), Montevideo, Uruguay, 2019 – 2020.

 

 

The composition Orbis | La Batalla de Nancy integrates five elements:

1) Con los muchachos [With the guys]. Acoustic Space, 4-channel sound installation. Vladimir Guicheff (with the collaboration of Fabrizio Rossi) upon a fragment of Landaus, a Liederbuch composed by Vladimir Guicheff upon texts by Francisco Tomsich, as performed in Cologne, Germany, on 11.27.2018 by the Kollektiv 3: 6 Koeln ensemble. The recording of that performance is used here as the primary material of a looped one-hour composition made especially for this show. The text of the chosen fragment, sketched in Spanish in Nancy, France, and written originally in German, reads:

With the boys we drink along the river.
We do not sing songs from this time.
The roles of space and time were exchanged.
The roles, which we exchange.
With the roles we drink every afternoon,
by the river we hang bottles from the trees.
And the people who pass
by the other shore they look at us,
they think of our malice,
about our innocence.
For us there is not enough malice,
not enough innocence, to talk about colors.
We don’t say much, we shout loudly,
and when it rains we stay at home.
Our music is gone.

2) Iconocante semidesnudo. Site-specific installation. Wood, cardboard, staples, nails. Built in the second half of November, 2019, by Francisco Tomsich and Niklaus Strobel. The wood used to build it comes almost entirely from “La carpintería”, a space located in the basement of the exhibition room itself that was occupied by the artist as a studio between November 4th and 26th, 2019. A high percentage of the cardboard was acquired at the classifiers’ office of Montevideo Shopping Center thanks to the mediation of María Eugenia Vidal and Arlene Ychuste and the kind collaboration of Laura de Barrios.

3) Profecía sobre Montevideo [Prophecy upon Montevideo]. TV, DVD player, wood, subtitles file. Video, 24’59. The .srt file is a selection of poems from the homonymous book, written mostly in Nancy, France, in 2013-2014.

4) Silent Works | Under the bridge. Single-channel video, monochrome, silent, 6’25’, loop.

5) Veda (Triptych). Coal, chalk, lime, pigments, earth, mud, pencil, homemade oil, acrylic paint and pastel on “Panamá” fabric, 280 x 280 cm each, November 2019. The blue one is titled En el museo (“In the museum”), the yellow one La reina (“The Queen”) and the red one Las máscaras (“The masks”).