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Cuando las nubes eran las olas (When the clouds were the waves)

Ana Navas and Mirtru Escalona-Mijares
Friday, January 13, 2023 at 7PM
Concert Hall

Cuando las nubes eran las olas (When the clouds were the waves) is an electro-acoustic performance and installation for EMPAC’s Concert Hall by Venezuelan-Ecuadorian artist Ana Navas and Venezuelan composer Mirtru Escalona-Mijares. It is performed by American percussionists Taylor Long, Robert Cosgrove, and Clara Warnaar on an array of playful instrument-sculptures by Navas, which fuse iconic motifs of 20th century modernism with traditional boat-building tools and techniques.

Cuando las nubes eran las olas is an expansive work of visual art and music inspired by the Aula Magna, the Central University of Venezuela’s auditorium, and the artworks commissioned for the campus by Venezulan, European, and American modernists by its architect Carlos Raúl Villanueva in the early 1950s. The Aula Magna houses Alexander Calder’s sculptural Acoustic Ceiling (1953), known locally as “nubes” (clouds). It is the first instance of acoustic panels suspended across the ceiling of a hall to reflect optimal acoustics. This feature resonates with EMPAC’s Concert Hall, which houses the first fabric ceiling to span the full-length of the hall to shape the sound.

Deeply embedded in the afterlives of iconic modernist artworks, Navas’ sculptures, installations, and performances trace the use and misuse of such works over time as they are circulated as reproductions and appropriated away from the site and context of their original making. For Cuando las nubes eran las olas, Navas’ sculptural instruments, costumes, and scenography and Escalona-Mijares’ multi-layered approach to electro-acoustic composition interweaves the architectural properties of the Aula Magna with its thick social and sonic history in an exploration of the relationship between sculpture, acoustics, and space.

Main Image: Cuando las nubes eran las olas (When clouds were waves), 2022. Courtesy the artist. Photo: Alvis Mosley/EMPAC.

Media

In Conversation: Ana Navas and Mirtru Escalona-Mijares: Cuando las nubes eran las olas (When the clouds were waves)

Dates + Tickets

Music/Sound
Time-Based Visual Art
Cuando las nubes eran las olas (When the clouds were the waves)
Ana Navas and Mirtru Escalona-Mijares
Friday 13
7:00 PM
January 2023
$20 / $15 / RPI Students: in advance $6, same day FREE

COVID-19 Policy⁣

Campus community: RPI protocols apply. ID check required.⁣
Off-campus audience: Proof of Vaccination or masking with N-95 mask required. ⁣

When events require everyone to wear a mask in the venue, masks will be available on entry.⁣

Presented By

EMPAC Spring 2023

Season

Curator
Production Credits

Curatorial research in collaboration with Jennifer Burris and the Calder Foundation. With thanks to IRCAM, Paris for residency support.

Funding

This project is supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts. To find out more about how National Endowment for the Arts grants impact individuals and communities, visit www.arts.gov.

This project is supported by New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.

This project is supported by a Curatorial Research Fellowship from The Andy Warhol Foundation.