Across the months of October and November 2023, the artistic investigation Not Yet, Still will be developed inside the Museo Reina Sofía. The project by artist and researcher Paz Rojo is articulated via two laboratories, an encounter, a stage experiment and a conversation, research that is part of Rojo’s broader project Morir Bien (Die Well), which draws inspiration from contemporary materialism and ecological thought to explore the encounter with declining historicity in the present time by way of the relationship between dance, the unknown and aesthetic experience.
In the current context, besieged by crisis thinking and successive forms of epistemic violence, Not Yet, Still seeks to explore the dismantling of our time from the conceptual figure of ruin. What senses are opened before the presence of a time, a body and a stage on the verge of falling? Through ruin, we can delve deeper into the aesthetic scope of a time which, catastrophically and tragically, does not belong to us. As temporal and material figuration, ruin dissolves time for us, allowing us to start after the end: to listen to the remains, to what is left in spite of it all. Through ruin we let ourselves fall and contribute to the demolition of narratives and paradigms which weave our era; we open ourselves to the time of everything we are not and situate ourselves on a post-contemporary stage, ultimately experiencing an encounter with the aesthetics of a strange and immensely open time: a time which has, at the same time, a future and spectral quality.
Morir Bien is a project funded by Madrid City Council’s grants for contemporary creation. With the support of the residencies programme Notar, promoted by the MAR Platform (Museo Reina Sofía, hablarenarte and Fundación Daniel and Nina Carasso, Madrid); Radicantes (IVAM, Valencia); Festival Citemor (Portugal); Live Arts Laboratory, Tenerife Lab (Tenerife); the Los Barros Centre of Artists’ Residencies (Madrid) and the Notes for a Time Apart programme (Museo Reina Sofía).
More information on the event can be found here.