A performance by Bárbara Sánchez-Kane, Darío afb & Young Boy Dancing Group

With the generous support of Aeromexico and Tequila Casa Dragones

A misshapen and anguished being at the center of the scene. Its hollows deform as belts pull its skin. What lies beyond its orifices? Where does this black hole lead us? Some details of this three-footed organism escape the eye, disorienting it: a leg, gloves, an absent arrow. A whole that is never fully complete, purely rejoicing in artifice and excess, an exquisite corpse or ritual weaving that Bárbara Sánchez-Kane, Darío afb, and Young Boy Dancing Group offer at a minimalist altar for Dover Street Market Paris.

Sumptuous, overflowing folds, like Mallarmé’s yellow folds of thought, who also believed the meaning of the work of art hides in the interstices1. In line with the proliferation and redundancy inherent in the baroque, the artist articulates a lexicon of obsessions and fetishes through the hybridization of fashion and visual arts (sanchezkaneism), pushing the limits of materiality to the extreme. An exuberant worldview where the wild visual culture of the Mexican metropolis is in constant collision: from Diana the Huntress to hardware stores and markets. Everything fits and transforms in Bárbara’s toolbox.

Sánchez-Kane’s powerful sculpture serves as the set for the Young Boy Dancing Group, a collective whose performance corrodes the norms of contemporary dance. What connects both visions? Perhaps the defiant gesture, the tense relationship between space and the flesh and its sculptural dimension, opening the possibility of creating lascivious statues, pyramids, connections, and constellations with the human figure. About to fight or about to fuck, the dancers wear hooks and crevices in their garments to connect themselves with retractable belts, the same that are used as barriers to form lines at banks and airports, metamorphosed into a labyrinth of multiple exits and metaphors.

Is it possible to desire without possession? How do we find delight in waiting? Can distance fuel desire? Pulses and anxieties are released in a rhizomatic dance. YBDG’s convulsive choreography traces impossible silhouettes over space, silhouettes ruled by a logic of mutation, silhouettes that reveal an inclination towards dismembered, inharmonious, voluptuous anatomies emptied of organs. Bodies yet to be known. Disobedient bodies that unleash their libido in a universe without directions or binaries.

Nothing remains stable, like in the altarpieces of colonial churches, where virgins and saints are depicted in an effeminate way to create the illusion of movement. Above, two voyeur angels contemplate the scene; one of them, a brazen putto, urinates on the flames. The Mexican historian Justino Fernández described the curious presence of cherubs in the ultra baroque altarpieces “with their legs in the air, twisted bodies, flowing garments, and spread wings, to give them the greatest freedom and airiness.”2 The angelic couple witnesses the earthly battle, the joyful wait for condemnation.

Condemnation, yes, for this hallucinatory tableau vivant, which is also a test of conscience, evokes the torments of the Garden of Earthly Delights. But the artist has subverted the infernal chronotope; hell is no longer below but everywhere. We no longer fear hell because we live in it. During its conception, Rimbaud’s scream was heard, burning marvelously, in the insatiable search for a personal hell: ecstasy, nightmare, a dream in a nest of flames.3 The religious analogies gain undeniable strength. For Sánchez-Kane, clothing stands as our first confrontation with the world, like a confessional, an intimate space where desires are revealed and sins are atoned.

How does one unravel a spectacle whose planning exceeds disciplines and time periods? An opera without a director, without beginning or end, composed of touching and moaning, biting and flashing. The composer —from whose shoulders hang leather limbs— improvises a special piece, inspired by Pierre Boulez’s scores.

Or, rather, a desiring machine dependent on other desiring machines to function in the hiatuses and ruptures, among breakdowns and failures.4 Thus, the failure of one materiality becomes the pleasure of another. After the fire, the debris of this forever unfinished work will serve another a palimpsest of ashes that burns and rewrites itself for eternity. Like how Octavio Paz defined that great convoluted machine that is Duchamp’s The Large Glass, “an unfinished painting in perpetual incompletion.” 5

We are faced with a dysfunctional machine producing dysfunctional poetry, composed of noise and cacophony, dissonance and repetition. Perhaps that’s where a revolt begins. More than theatricalizing irrationality to generate a schizoid antidiscourse, the staged event orchestrated by Sánchez-Kane, in harmony with the punk sensitivity of the event’s poster, dismantles the mechanisms —institutional, familial, patriarchal— that control our desire, reclaiming beauty in chaos and the creative power of destruction.

–Juan Pablo Ramos, San Andrés de la Cal, September 2024

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Juan Pablo Ramos (Mexico City, 1993) is a narrator and essayist with a master’s degree in Literature from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. He is the author of La mitika mákina de karaoke. He is a recipient of the Jóvenes Creadores grant (2023-2024) in Creative Writing, and has published with Tierra Adentro, Nexos and Montez Press.

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October 17, 7 pm 

Dover Street Market Paris

35-37 Rue des Francs Bourgeois, Paris

TICKETS

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We thank Aeromexico for allowing Mexican talent to fly high. This support reaffirms their commitment to bringing the best of contemporary Mexico to the world.

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1. Stéphane Mallarmé, “Herodiane” from Collected Poems (The University of California Press, 1994). In the original French: “les plis jaunes de la pensée”.
2. Justino Fernández, Estética del arte mexicano (Mexico: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México; Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas, 1972), 352.
3. Arthur Rimbaud, “Nuit de l’Enfer” (1873). In the original French: “Extase, cauchemar, sommeil dans un nid de flammes”.
4. Gilles Deleuze y Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, (University of Minnesota Press, 1972) 42.
5. Octavio Paz, “Apariencia desnuda. La obra de Marcel Duchamp,” Obras completas, vol. IV (México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2014), 148.