Curated by Pedro G. Romero
Sacco. The sack of Rome, the crisis of representation and the flamencos.
BLOCKS / STABLE
Quadrant of the Tempietto del Bramante, Chiesa di San Pietro in Montorio, Rome
Thursday, June 13, between 3 p.m. and 10 p.m.
Free entry and exit.
Exhibited as a double screen in the Accademia from June 16.
An event for the horses Buck Red Skin, Bambi Sailor, Onkaia,
San Special Solanos and Cool Boy, the Guapa mule and the Agostino donkey.
With the guitars of Pepe Habichuela,
Alfredo Lagos, Raül Fernandez Refree, María Marín,
Riccardo Ascani, Bruno Alviani and Ciro Barsueto.
Directed by Isaki Lacuesta & Pedro G. Romero
With the participation of Stefan Voglsinger, Ludovica Manzetti, Matteo Binci, María García, Maria Doriana Casadidio, Tony Di Mauro, Cizia Mariani, Simone Minigghini, Guillermo Cascante, Julio Criado, Laura Tremoleda, Santí Baró
Photography. Ludovica Manzetti, 2019.
The starting point is found in the stories of the Abbot of Nájera, Juan Bartolomé de Gattinara, Giraldi Cinthio, Francisco de Salazar, Balthasar de Castiglione, Francisco Delicado, Benvenuto Cellini or Francisco de Holanda, among many other chroniclers, descriptions of what it meant the desecration of the churches turned into stables for horses, mules and donkeys during the Sacco of Rome in 1527. The Vatican Basilica itself was occupied by the cavalry of the Protestant lansquenetes who made a show of what this action was irreverent about. However, in the circle of Alonso and Juan de Valdés, in dialogue with the illuminated enlightenment and erasmism, another interpretation of this same gesture was opened, since, in short, turning the temples into a stable was nothing but a return to poverty and humility of the original Church, to return to the stable in which the Messiah, the Christ, had been born. So, we have, at the same time, displayed in the same gesture the desecration and sacralization of the same space.
For our purpose it has been interesting to understand the equine vision system. His two eyes give separate field shots to the two hemispheres of his brain, leaving blind spots on the axis that goes from tail to muzzle, gaps that are completed by the ear. What they hear helps to complete two fields of vision that are always at the same time and different. The animote, says Derrida, must add both the zoology and the cultural significance of the animal.
The numerous existing literature on what horses listen to, what music they prefer, what their rhythms are, was displaced by the experiences told by the great gypsy and flamenco guitarist, Pepe Habichuela, and from there the decision to incorporate the sound of the many guitars flamenco, that music precisely. During the event, Pedro G. Romero and Isaki Lacuesta will make audio and video recordings seeking to find precisely that double vision, double perspective, multiplication of points of view. Simone Weil thought that this was a property of the mystical gaze and Slavoj Žižeck has called it “parallax vision” and turned it into a tool of materialistic dialectics. Nothing extraordinary, it is a common experience of looking. Only it does not operate and, in representations, we let ourselves be governed by the fixed point of view. What we want to try is this alternative possibility of seeing, to underline it. A framed circle, the space of the Tempietto del Bramante, is not only sacred ground, it also stands as a monument to the techniques of perspective, a vision apparatus that has been hegemonic since the beginning of the modern age, since the so-called Renaissance. Undermining his emblematic character, his martyrdom, has something of a political gesture. What the public will be able to see and hear is all that: the animals and the animotes, a flamenco guitar concert directed at horses, mules and donkeys, the split recording in video and audio of the same, the divided architectural space, the flickering of the fireflies in the vicinity and a proliferation of views.
