In the Midst of Things

Jennifer Allora & Guillermo Calzadilla
Jennifer Allora born in Philadelphia, USA , in 1974.
Guillermo Calzadilla born in Havana, Cuba, in 1971.
They live and work in San Juan, Puerto Rico.

During the past twenty years, Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla have risen to international prominence with their layered and complex artistic experiments. They use sculpture, live performance, video, sound, and photography in varying combinations to evoke contemporary geopolitics, cultural artifacts, and the deep time of archaeological history. In so doing, they interrogate the structural and narrative conventions of storytelling and explore the potential of language and materiality to give meaning to their artistic research.
Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla have studied the ephemeral nature of collective drawing with monumental sticks of chalk at the Bienal de Lima, Peru (Chalk [Lima]) (1998–2002); the imprints of colonial, nationalist, and military violence on the diverse populations and landscapes of Vieques, Puerto Rico (Landmark) (2001–2002); and the resonance of playing, warping, and combining music from various moments in history, as in Clamor (2006), Stop, Repair, Prepare: Variations on Ode to Joy for Prepared Piano (2008), and Raptor’s Rapture (2012). Their work challenges viewers to build meaning through interpretation by reading the work as literal, metaphorical, evidential, and political, but also to take part in the work as an experiential event that heightens one’s aesthetic sensibility.
For the 56th Biennale di Venezia, Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla present In the Midst of Things, a new choral work with music by Gene Coleman performed by Voxnova Italia and based on The Creation (Die Schöpfung) (1796–1798) by Joseph Haydn. The Creation’s libretto draws on accounts from the book of Genesis and Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667), which describe the origins of the world and humankind. Milton’s poem relates the story of the Fall of Man, following the epic tradition of starting in medias res, after the action has already begun and with the background recounted later.
For the performance at the Biennale, Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla have reconstructed the libretto and asked composer Gene Coleman to set this text to music. The resulting work applies various narrative techniques—such as reverse chronology, flashback, and flash-forward—as structural devices in the composition. It literally intervenes in the order of the original libretto and score, with some sections moving forward, then backward, and jumping across others. Moreover, Coleman’s composition reduces language in the libretto to its fundamental elements of tone (vowels) and noise (consonants) and then rebuilds the text using techniques such as overtone and multiphonic singing to create a complex sonic landscape. These techniques, along with the accompanying back-masking and phonetic reversal of the sung words, are further emphasized through parallel stage movements. The singers physically move forward or backward depending on whether they are singing parts of the libretto forward or in reverse.
In the Midst of Things delves into the structural mechanics of writing and musical composition, considering what makes a certain arrangement of words, movements, and sonic progressions resonate with human emotions. Likewise, it explores how new meaning can be generated by pushing language to its limits (the backside of language). The resulting combination of alien, yet structurally coupled sounds and words open this famous oratorio to a reconsideration of humankind’s origins and time itself.