HACTION POETRY
Exploratory sessions on Carles Hac Mor and Ester Xargay
In the early 1990s, Carles Hac Mor and Ester Xargay turned La Virreina Centre de la Imatge into one of Barcelona’s hotbeds of performance art, organising and putting on various collective and large-scale sessions, bringing together artists from different families, worlds and generations in a showcase of radicalism, spontaneity, heterodoxy and cross-pollination with the other arts, but especially with recited poetry and experimental music.
The first two of these now totally legendary soirées, “Nihil obstat” and “Waning West” (grouped under the title “Ali-Dada in Action: Paraparemic Epiphanies in Evocation of the Universal Leridadan Arthur Cravan”), were held on 20 and 21 October 1992, respectively, as part of the exhibition Arthur Cravan: Poet and Boxer at La Virreina Centre de la Imatge (curated by Maria Lluïsa Borràs, Carles Hac Mor, Ester Xargay and Vicenç Altaió). A boxing ring was set up in the building’s entrance courtyard as the stage, and the chairs and floor of the courtyard were overflowing with people. By elevating Arthur Cravan to the prototype of the subversive poet (and of the contemporary artist by extension), a bohemian con man and provocateur, a pre-Dadaist, a pioneer of the anti-art of conceptualism, with the ultimate nihilistic act, which consisted of setting sail in the Gulf of Mexico in November 1918 in a small boat he had restored himself and disappearing forever, the sessions were much like a popular party and a soirée at the Cabaret Voltaire, as well as an “annihilating caricature of all the avant-garde movements” (to use an expression that Carles Hac Mor once used in reference to the Lettrism of Isidore Isou). Moreover, its format must have evoked the Price de los Poetas of 1970 among some of those attending.
Participants in these sessions included Benet Rossell, Àngel Jové, Zush, Pere Noguera, Tres, Macromassa, Enric Casasses, Xavier Manubens, Maite Ninou, C-72R (Mònica Buxó, Sònia Buxó and Marta Domínguez), Borja Zabala, Óscar Abril Ascaso + Sedcontra, Imma Pla, Xavier Canals, J. M. Calleja, Francesca Llopis and more. Toni Serra and Jacobo Sucari recoded the sessions on video. Consuelo Bautista, Joan Casellas and others took photographs.
This was the first instalment of a practice (except for the “Small Monumental Tribute to the Universal Catalan Poet and Boxer Arthur Cravan”, held on 22 June 1983 at Galería Ciento in Barcelona) that would gradually become characteristic of Carles Hac Mor and Ester Xargay. It consisted of collectively occupying and overrunning an institutional space and transforming it into a plural, heterogeneous and spontaneous gathering, practically without labels, directives or filters.
The following year (in October and November 1993), they curated the series Action: The Subject as an Art Object at La Virreina (with interventions by Jaume Alcalde, Pere Noguera, Àngels Ribé, Benet Rossell, Borja Zabala, Eugènia Balcells, Jordi Benito, Zush and others). In 1996, they curated the series Action against Action: Theory and Practise of an Artistic Language without a Code (with interventions by Jordi Benito, Barbara Held, Àngels Ribé, Benet Rossell, Eulàlia Valldosera, Manuel Delgado, Pep Aymerich, J. M. Calleja, Xavier Canals, Nieves Correa, Jaume Alcalde, Borja Zabala, Lluís Alabern, Óscar Abril Ascaso, Joan Casellas, Eduard Escofet, C-72R, Dídac P. Lagarriga, Imma Pla and others).
The institutional space had a corollary in the occupation of the street, an epigone of the tradition of surrealist psychogeographies. We are referring to the years when Carles Hac Mor and Ester Xargay launched the first “By Word of Mouth: Spoken Magazine” (1993-1995), inspired by those that Blaise Gautier did in Paris, which were of a purely literary content and were later transformed into “Walking Magazines” (originally a dozen sessions organised continuously between 1995 and 1996, then sporadically), or the “Undisciplined Agoras” (1995-1996), at Sala Metrònom.
With these public programmes, La Virreina Centre de la Imatge is reviving two of the most vibrant, energising, heterodox and omnivorous artists of the Catalan art scene in the previous fifty years, whose fingerprints can be seen everywhere. They almost always worked at the constant confluence and hybridisation of literature, performance, theatre, film, music and the visual arts, all whilst tirelessly generating collective experiences. La Virreina takes on the dual objective of championing their spirit and addressing the imperative need to produce testimony and documentation about their work and especially about their influence on many different generations of artists and their interrelationship with them.
These first four sessions are divided into two sections. In the first, entitled “Tribute to the Arthur Cravan Tribute”, we will once again set up the boxing ring in La Virreina’s courtyard to give visibility to artists close to Carles Hac Mor and Ester Xargay through action, music and poetry. The session will begin on 2 October with a very special and eagerly awaited joint project between the collectives Free’t and Nicomedes Mendes, focusing on the written poetry of Carles Hac Mor and Ester Xargay. Free’t creates compositions in real time through the interaction of music, movement, words and imagery. It works through collective improvisation, exploring how disciplines relate to and transform each other. The art direction is led by the musician Arnau Millà. The poets of Nicomedes Mendes are Núria Martínez-Vernis, Guim Valls, Víctor Bonet Arbolí and Oriol Sauleda, and their performances combine poetic improvisation, sound experimentation and choral recitation.
This “Tribute to the Arthur Cravan Tribute” will continue on 3 October in the boxing ring set up in La Virreina’s courtyard with a wide-reaching, intergenerational session of artists based on action, music and poetry, including Pia Sommer, Enric Casasses, Barbara Held, Pere Noguera, Maria Sevilla, Albert Vidal, Roger Peláez and Llapispanc. Here we will bring back two members of the original session of 1992, Pere Noguera and Enric Casasses. We will also enjoy the special participation of two artists of Carles Hac Mor’s generation, with whom he maintained a relationship of mutual inspiration and a very special bond: Albert Vidal and Pere Noguera.
The second block, under the heading “CHMEX Exploratory”, also consists of two sessions, which will take place in Espai 4 at La Virreina Centre de la Imatge. On 6 November, the roundtable discussion “Carles Hac Mor, Ester Xargay, Film and Video” will take place, with Manuel Huerga, Maite Ninou, Eugeni Bonet and Isaki Lacuesta participating. And on 7 November, Marc Audí will introduce a very special guest, Julien Blaine, with whom he will talk about putting the work and career of Carles Hac Mor and Ester Xargay in the context of the international contemporary subversive poetry scene. One of the most influential and prolific figures in action and experimental poetry in French in the last fifty years, Blaine will also peel back the layers of a personal memory.
