Laia Torrents and Roger Aixut are the two souls of Cabosanroque. And they are two souls because, despite the joint work they have been doing for a long time, they can disagree on many things. This is the richness of creativity, clearly, and yesterday, at the presentation of the trilogy at the CCCB, they could not hide the satisfaction of the culmination of a work that they have ended up calling An Expanded Theater Trilogy.
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 approached each in the way they have deemed relevant. “These are three ways of entering the work of three authors, who have in common that they wrote in a minority and, at the time, persecuted language. They are works of sound art. We take an exhibition space and put a dramaturgy on top of it. What we do is stretch the theater’s seams”, explains Torrents. “For each work we were the beneficiaries of a research grant, which gave us well over a year to do this sublimation of these three authors”.
The trilogy of immersive installations and soundscapes began in 2015 with the commission to make the Brossa one. Resident authors of the Lluís Coromina Foundation since then, the immensity of Brossian’s work made them doubt how to approach it. “Perejaume advised us to enter through the work of the forties, which is all there, and that’s how we did it,” confesses Torrents.
“What we do with Brossa is use all his creative strategies, such as transformation, alliteration, magic… and we bring it to the sound field and apply our discipline to it,” he continues. I was not made by Joan Brossa can be visited until July 12.
Then came Verdaguer (2019) and Rodoreda (2022), but then they were no longer commissions. Cabosanroque approached it through different paths: it was no longer the complete work, but an aspect. “With Verdaguer we are not dealing with a work, but with some personal notes on the exorcism, which he took for four years. The figure of Verdaguer links the visible with the invisible, the individual with the community. The continent does not match the content”, explains Torrents. And Aixut adds: “There is no intention to dive into Verdaguer, but into his demons. The installation of Demons (until July 30) is a scale reproduction of the flat on Carrer Mirallers where Verdaguer attended the exorcisms”.
“With Rodoreda, we take a book that has been little recognized, Viatges i flors, and we have linked it with Svetlana Alexiévich. 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. I didn’t do it Joan Brossa is like entering a poem, Demons is like an essay and Flors i viatages, a story. All three of us work with the sound of the word, beyond its meaning”, concludes Aixut.
