Curro Rodriguez
SAETA Stones Dialogue | The sound of air sliced through as a rock moves, at high speed, thrown with all your might. The voice that escapes when an unexpected rock flake imprisons your hand. The first voice, the primal stone, the first tool. The vernacular expression of being as an entity in front of nature, in front of life, in front of pain. It is the primitive lament that bruises the throat when leaving excessively when the body unfolds and finds itself in front of itself, being offering and executioner, altar and priest, mineral and blood.
Obviate the divine in the grandeur of creation and bring it to the surface, turning prayer into matter and pain into prayer. Saeta is an identity search process. referring to the human being as cause and effect, from the most basic, movement, violence, screaming, and rock, to try to give understanding to our actions, in an introspective, solitary way, my Self in front of the sublime of creation, pagan or divine. A set of ceremonies carried out as a mantra, giving absolute freedom to the feeling, whatever it may be, in a therapeutic way. A performative catharsis in which only the body, the rock, and the jondo (the scream) are part, for this reason, Saeta is a constant repetition of elements, voices, and gestures.
These main and unique elements are those that make up the corpus of this work: Rock|| The stone is the body, the altar and the offering. Body/stone. Air/stone. Will/Stone. The first and the last sign. Matter as a primal element to change the landscape, to reproduce the imaginary. The rock as transmutation of flesh into mineral and vice versa. Body|| Meat as movement, as a motor, as a gesture, as a reaction. The body represented as an altar and as an offering. As germ and as fruit. The duality of matter. Action container. Scream|| The muffled voice, The ascent of the tear. The atmosphere, the ethereal. The Rite, the purge, the selfdestruction, and at the same time the maximum manifestation of existence. TheShout (jondo) is that of the Body/Rock confrontation.
The rituality and the philosophy and poetics of Flamenco create the conceptual basis of a Project with which I intend to delve, from a personal way, into the depths of an expression that brings us closer and connects us with the telluric, with the ancestral, the instinctive or animal. A ritualproces s and performative, outside the canons of what we would understand by Flamenco from a classical point of view as far as photography is concerned. Saeta is a process, not a result, a cult in itself.
The stone and the prayer, the cult, the punishment and the prayer, everything is related in this cultural context in which Saeta moves, and of course, from which it takes its name, since the saetas, historically come from the call to prayer that the Arabs performed from the mosques, becoming the song that today is dedicated to Christian religious images in order to obtain a divine grace or redeem some evil deed. The stoning, the adoration of the Black Stone of the Kaaba, or the different animatisms or divinization of objects such as minerals, throughout the anthropological history of tribes and civilizations. The stone and the scream have always benefited from a sacred corner in the history of man.
It is necessary to mention the brutalist and violent complement that is generated in this work. The violence exerted is understood as a way of relaxing tensions between two specific points to avoid further damage. Flamenco is characterized by force, by the explosion and the outburst of the scream, we could say that the release of force, the voice in this case acts as a regulator of those tensions. In turn, the performative work focuses on that captivating relationship generated by contact, force, or the simple landscape, at different levels, either objectively or in a more subtle and evocative way. In any case, from both perspectives, we conclude in a ritual manner with a cathartic and Dionysian ending.
A liturgy, a rite that is repeated infinitely until the edges of the bedrock are polished. The transmutation of the totem into voice, the transformation of the stone into an angel. This ceremony is a confrontation, and at the same time, an alliance with hostile nature, from where we reaffirm our existence. It is our foundation. The rock is the direct link to matter; when hitting it, we receive the echo of the ancestral, the echo of the universe. That is Saeta. Back to the core. Back to scream Back to stone. http://currorodriguez.com
