An Evening with Claudia Pagès

In this program with video and performance artist Claudia Pagès, the artist shares various facets of her artistic research. Pagès’s past works have often engaged with palimpsests in which informal, vernacular languages and customs are at cross-purposes with official operations and the semantics of power.

Her recent work often swerves from intriguing cultural symbols to the raw material structures that underlie them and back to the unstable substance of language. A recent work Typo-Topo-Time Aljibe at SculptureCenter New York focused on a Moorish cistern successively rebuilt across many centuries, such that each architectural update coincided with new forms of displacement and cultural erasure. Through performance, video, and sculptural installation with a custom-made LED screen she fabricated, Pagès and her collaborators move through the graffiti in the cistern. The marks on its walls become a kind of found score that enlivens a complex flow of economic exchange and evolving cultural systems.

The program with Pagès at EMPAC comprises sonic interventions, an informal performance of work in progress, and dialogue around the current project she is pursuing as an artist in residence. The artist’s work occupies what the artist refers to as the gerund: a space of language and movement that is detached from any particular subject.

Circulating, administering, grouping, and ungrouping—Pagès’s projects explore how discrete actions turn into endless tracings of motion and generate new forms of power. Pagès is particularly interested in the cultural life of logistics, often focusing on patterns of trade as they are reflected in material culture.