Touring performance 'Breathings of the moon' by Leonor Serrano Rivas and Diego Delas

Performance, sampierota boat, rower, Venice canal

Commissioned by TBA21-Academy.

Breathings of the moon functions as both a performance and an expedition into the underwater worlds of the Venice Lagoon and its canals. Rooted in the idea of a magic trick, it follows the logic of pre-scientific amusement artifacts that looked at the world and its different scales with fresh eyes.

It is structured as a series of quasi-theatrical progressive steps to be taken: to hold the hand of the rower (eternal storyteller), to descend into a vessel, to enter the belly of a quasi-fish, and to get used to the dark. Looking into the water through an instrument, resonating with the rower, the canal, the rhythms of the lagoon, and embodying a multiplicity of tidal patterns, to come back anew, return changed, amused and amazed, disembarking elsewhere-close, but elsewhere, perhaps on a much more complex realm.

Both artists, architects and researchers, Leonor Serrano Rivas and Diego Delas obtained their Masters in Arts in London (at Goldsmiths and the Royal College of Art) and studied their PhD in art practice in the UK (Slade, UCL, and The Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford). Serrano Rivas’s sculptures, films, and installations are often used as a way to present layered sensorial experiences where the viewer must forget the narrative impulse, unlearn the desire for resolution, and delve into the realm of the work. Delas’s paintings, textiles, and installations look at certain vernacular architectural motifs related to storytelling that configure the idea of a house as a familiar body, sustained by memories and populated with amulets.