Laia Torrents and Roger Aixut are the two souls of Cabosanroque. And they are two souls because, despite the joint work that they have been carrying out for a long time, they can come to disagree in many aspects. This is the wealth of creativity, of course, and yesterday, at the presentation of their trilogy at the CCCB, they also could not hide the satisfaction of completing a work that they have ended up calling Una trilogia de teatre expandit.
The three pieces that make up this trilogy have to do with Brossa, Verdaguer and Rodoreda, three pillars of contemporary Catalan literature, which Cabosanroque has each approached in the way they considered appropriate. “There are three ways of entering the work of three authors, who have in common that they wrote in a minority language and, at the time, persecuted. They are works of sound art. We take an exhibition space and put a play on it. What we do is stretch the seams of the theater”, explains Torrents. “For each work we were recipients of a research grant, which gave us a year to make this sublimation of these three authors.”
The trilogy of immersive installations and soundscapes began in 2015 with the commission to make the one by Brossa. Resident authors of the Fundació Lluís Coromina since then, the immensity of Bross’s work made them doubt how to approach it. “Perejaume advised us to enter through the work of the forties, where everything is, and we did so”, confesses Torrents.
“What we do with Brossa is use all of her creative strategies, such as transformism, alliteration, magic… and we take her to the sound field and apply our discipline to it,” she continues. No em va fer Joan Brossa can be visited until July 12.
Later came Verdaguer (2019) and Rodoreda (2022), but then they were no longer commissioned. Cabosanroque approached it in different ways: it was no longer the complete work, but an aspect. “With Verdaguer we did not deal with a work, but with some personal notes on exorcism, which he took for four years. The figure of Verdaguer links the visible with the invisible, the individual with the community. The container does not match the content”, explains Torrents. And Aixut adds: “There is no intention of diving into Verdaguer, but into his demons. Dimonis’ montage (until July 30) is a scale reproduction of the apartment on Mirallers street where Verdaguer attended exorcisms”.
“With Rodoreda we took a book that has been little recognized, Voyages i flors, and we linked it with Svetlana Alexiévitx. It blew our minds because today Svetlana gives us all the keys to understand and interpret Rodoreda”. Flowers and trips can be visited from July 15 to 30.
In the three pieces, Cabosanroque has had the collaboration of several artists, such as El Niño de Elche, Rocío Molina, Enric Casasses, Núria Martínez-Vernis, Núria Graham or the Ukrainian war refugee women. “Brossa is the darkness, Verdaguer is the white darkness and Rodoreda is the color. It didn’t make me Joan Brossa es como entrar dentro un poema, Demonis es como un ensayo and Flors i viatags, un cuento. The three of us work with the sound of the word, more than its meaning”, concludes Aixut.
