Elvira Santamaria-Torres
Liminaris/on the threshold – Gestures on Resilience – Process art, photography and video.
Elvira has made a process art work, based on a chamber performance she did in 2010, Background Counting Line I. In this work she counts down numbers in 4 languages (Spanish, English, French and German) whilst building a tower of lit and unlit matches. A laser beam line is projected on the tower and a wall, which gets cut in dots on the wall by the tower itself. It was a memory game in the languages that she has hardly learned during the last 30 years due to her work and her character as an immigrant: the length of her artistic career.
In this project, she deconstructs this past artwork in a visual expression, through photography and video, of the memory of effort to hold the counting without forgetting the turn of the language or the number, or both. As a sort of Babbel Tower in her head trying to build something that expresses the inner drama of the different language working together for a common aim; hold a line of ‘common sense’ in the counting. The work is exploratory and methodical observing the inner logic of the initial proposal and the movements to develop new possibilities of discovering something she feels she hasn’t resolved yet. Elvira celebrates 30 years of her career as an artist this year.