The stone of sacrifice

We live in an age in which time slips through our fingers, with pressure to eternally fulfil unattainable precepts that erode us along the way. We live in an age where the body and appearance is a constant construction subjected to control and discipline. We believe we are free to design ourselves, but in many cases this freedom is nothing more than a covert docility, a reproduction of cultural canons and expectations. Control, discipline and the desire to achieve that idyllic paradise, whether in the form of a corporeal image or through an apparently successful life, allows us to realise this constant characteristic of people who dedicate themselves body and soul to their professional careers (from the field of sporting competition to professional artistic careers), accepting the sacrifices that this entails. What awaits us when we reach the epitome of this constant and stifling competition? What lies behind the constant trial and error?

From the competitive extremes in professional spheres to the most everyday roles in our society, we all find ourselves subjected to this dialogue between punishment, control, domestication and the aspiration to succeed.

The composer and saxophonist Irene Reig, the visual artist La Santa (Sandra Ortiz) and the performance artist Isa Fontbona, propose a three-way dialogue - sound-visual-corporal - to allow us to feel in our own skin the absurdities of our modus vivendi, in constant competition for a paradise of smoke, reminding us that our cultural tradition is often still playing havoc with our way of constructing our identity.

Links of interest:

-Irene Reig:
https://irenereigmusic.com/
https://www.instagram.com/irenereigg/?hl=es

-Sandra Ortiz:
https://www.instagram.com/lasanta___/
https://linktr.ee/Lasanta___

-Isa Fontbona:
https://isafontbona.com/
https://linktr.ee/isafontbona
https://www.instagram.com/isafontbona/

Taller de Músics
https://tallerdemusics.com/ca/el-taller-de-musics-participa-en-els-dimecres-de-so-i-cos/, 


Irene Reig
Musician and composer with a higher degree and a master's degree in jazz saxophone performance and modern music. Her musical beginnings were in the classical piano, a discipline that gives her the possibility of mixing different musical styles that are reflected in her compositions. She is currently a teacher at the ESMUC, an activity that she combines with her artistic career. After more than fifteen years dedicated exclusively to music, she has recorded five albums as a leader, although she has collaborated in many other projects that have also been recorded. She is part of the record label The Changes. 

Sandra Ortiz
‘La Santa’, Sandra Ortiz. She has a degree in Art History and is a visual artist. Her work as a photographer has focused on the performing arts, music and personal projects on remembrance and memory, where she is currently experimenting with video. Always with black and white taken to the extreme, with impossible saturations, love for detail and textures. She tells stories, searches for the invisible, the unsaid, where the body is a place. On 22 March 2024 she presented the installation Meteora at L'Albergueria in Vic with the video artist Natx Costa and the musician Toni Serrat. Ongoing project that continues to grow with different interventions and performances, the last one at Santa Mònica itself with composer and producer Pablo Carrascosa in June last year.

Isa Fontbona
PhD in Art History, performance artist and bodybuilding competitor. The fusion of these three spheres gives rise to an artistic formulation that uses the flesh as an artefact to promote thought. Fontbona conceives the body as an engine of creation, the flesh and sweat as a critical poetics, and the snorting as a mantra that penetrates the spectator in order to question oneself. Her exploration draws from bodybuilding through contemporary dance and physical theatre to reach a peculiar form of performance where physical exhaustion, resistance and dance with the limits of the body are the essence.

Titian, Sisyphus (1548-49)