Flávia Junqueira (São Paulo, 1985) is a Brazilian artist who for three years has been trying to evoke the memory of childhood in theaters and architectural spaces steeped in history where the past is still present. Her methodology is always the same: she fills them with colored balloons or other children’s items and carpets the floor with confetti and streamers. She then photographs them, and those almost painterly images are all that remains of her transitory landscapes. No one but her -and her technical team- of her have had the chance to inhabit them.
In her first intervention in a European theater, in this case the Liceu, the artist has gone further, and for a few hours her ephemeral installation has been a lived experience this Tuesday for a hundred people who were chosen by those responsible for the theater through a contest. After eight hours, the eight hundred helium balloons tied to the arms of the seats began to crumble…
“The intervention is also a way of elevating ourselves, of taking the seriousness out of society after what we have lived through,” says Víctor García de Gomar, the artistic director of the Liceu, in whose Saló dels Miralls the photograph will be exhibited starting on the 27th of october. The project is part of his will to establish a dialogue between theater and the visual arts and which to date has given rise to projects by artists such as Eugenio Ampudia, who filled the stalls with plants, William Kentridge or Jordi Bernadó .
Junqueira, who trusts that the one in Barcelona will be the first of a new series of interventions in Europe, explains that with his work he intends to create scenographies, “illusory and imaginary scenes that transport us to childhood, to activate that magical aspect that we keep in the memory all of us”.
