PRESENTATION: Allora & Calzadilla-Entelechy
Through a complex research-oriented practice, Allora & Calzadilla critically address the intersections and complicities between the cultural, the historical and the geopolitical. The interdisciplinary nature of their interventions is echoed by an expanded use of the artistic medium that includes performance, sculpture, sound, video and photography. Their dynamic engagement with the art historical results in an acute attention to both the conceptual and the material, the metaphoric as well as the literal.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo:Serralves Museum Archive
Titled “Entelechy”, the exhibition is the first mid-career survey of Allora & Calzadilla and a unique opportunity to experience in person some of their most celebrated works. Revealing new connections in an open-ended chronology, this ambitious presentation occupies the entire left wing and main Hall of Serralves Museum. The concept of “entelechy”, dating back to Aristotle, entails a sense of self-realized potential and vital force driving the development of every being; but it can also refer, in common language, to the unattainable perfection of an idea. This notion reflects the poetic and philosophical complexity of Allora & Calzadilla’s ongoing practice while it directly gives name to one of their most ambitious productions to date: a monumental coal sculpture cast from a tree struck by lightning in “Entelechy” (2020). The artists sourced a tree species found in the forest of Montignac, France, where a group of teenagers discovered the now-famous Lascaux Cave in 1940—an underground cavern containing hundreds of prehistoric wall drawings, which emerged in the middle of the geopolitical upheaval of World War II. The only image of a human figure to have ever been found in the cave—representing a hybrid of human and bird—becomes, in the meantime, the basis for the score that the composer David Lang developed together with Allora & Calzadilla as a performative dimension of this work. Covering more than two decades of practice, the exhibition brings together some of the duo’s most iconic pieces, including early installations such as “Chalk” (1998), a set of twelve human-size chalks installed at the north entrance of Parque da Cidade, inviting passers-by to engage with these unique mark-making instruments. Also featured in the show will be the body of work exploring the complex history of Vieques, an island off Puerto Rico that the United States Navy used as a bomb-testing site from 1941 until 2003. The project itself played a key role in the island’s social movements and has contributed decisively towards the debate on the relationships between the great world powers and the history of the Caribbean. Iconic films by the artists, such as “Returning a Sound” (2004), “Under Discussion” (2005) and “Half Mast/Full Mast” (2011), originated in the Vieques series as it thus encapsulated more than a decade of Allora & Calzadilla’s research. The works in this exhibition highlight the interdisciplinary and collaborative nature of the artists’ practice, as well as themes that run throughout their entire oeuvre, from the postcolonial condition to environmental justice and climate debt; geological time and the evolutionary history of life on Earth; geopolitics and energy resources. In this regard, this exhibition highlights a series of performance-based works that are central to Allora & Calzadilla’s trajectory, such as “Hope Hippo” (2005), “Stop, Repair, Prepare: Variations on ‘Ode to Joy’ for a Prepared Piano” (2008), “Lifespan (2014) and Entelechy” (2020), which will be regularly staged throughout the course of the exhibition in collaboration with local musicians and performers.
Photo left & right: Allora & Calzadilla, graft, 2019, 17500 flowers recycled polyvinyl chloride and paint, dimensions variable, installation view of allora & calzadilla: specters of noon, menil collection, 2020-2021
Info: Curator: Philippe Vergne and Inês Grosso, Serralves Museum, R. Dom João de Castro 210, Porto, Portugal, Duration: 12/5-29/10/2023, Days & Hours: Daily 10:00-19:00, www.serralves.pt/
