Air squeezed out through the palms of a soft clap, echoing in the cathedral. They were sweating on the screen. La gran mentira de la muerte (2024), a 40-minute multichannel sound and film installation by Wu Tsang, muses in solitude. The penumbra of the space, enhances the strangeness of French and Spanish romantic eras, rendering them all the more intriguing against the backdrop of contemporary times. One step outside the venue, dancers are still dancing to flamenco, skaters are everywhere, and kids are dancing to dembow and reggaeton for TikTok videos. It’s, July but it was nice and cool in the Capella of MACBA in Barcelona, just beside the public toilets of the skate square. It's also free entry/. I hope you can see it. It was beautiful. It moved me.
The installation was minimal; a screen touching the floor, an intense soundscape full of bass and claps, and the flamenco singing as the trumpets cheer on the bullfight. A tiny smoke machine pumps out myrrh-scented steam behind the screen, as they do at mass honoring the spiritus sanctus’s passion and death. Or it might be the smoke from the tobacco factory from the staging of Carmen in Schauspielhaus Zürich, of which this work is an iteration. Also, the ghost of Carmen, the heroine of the eponymous opera piece by Georges Bizet, played here by Tosh Basco, follows us in this work. The story presented in the film installation unfolds in just a few spoken sentences: “Come to me” is one, said by two protagonists, the flamenco singer and the dancer. Accepting the invitation, I edge closer to the screen. The actress has blood on her teeth. Her knuckles create a rhythm on the wooden table. It looks like it hurts.
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When Wu Tsang gave her press conference before the opening, she told us about when she first started her research on Carmen, the opera. She went to Sevilla, where a city tour guide showed her a side ally and said: “[t]hat's where Carmen ran around the corner and was stabbed to death by her jealous lover!” Wu told us that she had to ask: “But isn’t Carmen a fictional character?”. History and fiction blend here in the creation of the barbaric and the perpetuation of violence on the female body. Carmen is a fictional character, of course, I don’t know her personally, but I feel like I know her, she is a symbol of this continuity.
The film by Wu Tsang it’s not a report of what happened to Carmen, it plays with ambiguity by being something between a poem, a dream, a flamenco romance, a bullfight, and a grove of orange trees. We follow a group of performers; Rocío Molina José, El Oruco, Yinka Esi Graves, Tosh Basco, and a bull. One of my favorite scenes is when the camera takes the perspective of the bull, slicing through the pink capote de brega of the matadora, Vanessa Montoya. The cinematography is epic. I feel like I am the bull in this scene proudly facing my murderer. “I don’t love you anymore. You love me still and that is why you want to kill me.”* Carmen says in the novella by Prospera Mérimée, on which Bizet based his opera. The bull, the sacrificial prey of male fantasies of dominion, is Carmen’s spiritual stand-in in the film.
Draped in my Palestine football shirt, with my Arab face, and flamenco hairstyle, I delve into the murder of women and the conception of the barbaric as untamed menace. Listening intently, I realise I embody this fictionalized threat. The artist told us that, while creating the work, together with “Moved by Motion”, Tosh Basko asked the dancers what death looks like in flamenco, and that the reply is what we see recorded on the screen. Recording, by definition kills the live act, Wu told us, and since she has worked collaborating with live artists, performers, and musicians throughout her career, the title of the show at MACBA La gran mentira de la muerte (The big lie of death) is logical: death is a lie. I thought that made sense, because, by recording, you don’t kill the liveliness of the characters, you give them a new life, a new meaning, another context, a trace of the records. We need those records.
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Later, after I visited the show, I talked to the grandchild of Federico Garciá Lorca about how to archive his work. She said she doesn't want to make a relic out of him. She doesn’t want his house to become a museum of “the genius” behind glass vitrines. I thought I would have loved to see Wu recording Lorca, as she did Glenn Copeland, not killing them in the archive, but letting them live as inspiration. Carmen is one of those tales, received by the “Universal Broadcasting System”, as Copeland might have put it. We receive and we connect and make sense (and new sense) of it. I think it's a beautiful thought that things go into circulation in the universe. “Carmen belongs to nobody and everybody. She is everything her creators feared, and everything they desired. What was a threat to them is an inspiration to us,” Wu says.
Who tells the story, and for whom, is important though. I am happy to see Carmen, whose feminicide has been repeated on the stage since 1875, freed from a white male narrator. To liberate Carmen from a male gaze means also to liberate her earthly powers, which represent more than lust and sexuality. Carmen is this apotheosis of femininity, and how femininity is a synonym, under the heteropatriarchal scrutiny, for everything nonrational. She is an embodiment of the barbaric, wilderness; her weapon against the regime of rational dominion is her freedom. Freedom that needs to be tamed and oppressed. The disembodied understanding of Carmen in Tsang’s work makes room for the understanding of how her body is also the body of society. Carmen is a freedom fighter and a martyr. Carmen is the person who chooses sacrifice. "Never will Carmen submit. Free she was born, and free she will die!", and these words resonate throughout the world.
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Quotation from the novella **Carmen (1845), Prosper Mérimée.
EXHIBITION
The exhibition is on show at MACBA Barcelona until 03.11.2024.
- IMAGE CREDITS
Cover, fig. 1: LA GRAN MENTIRA DE LA MUERTE, WU TSANG, 2024. PHOTO ©JAIME TUÑÓN GARCÍA.
fig. 2: VIEWS OF THE EXHIBITIONS "LA GRAN MENTIRA DE LA MUERTE" (THE BIG LIE OF DEATH). PHOTO: MIQUEL COLL, 2024.
