Daniel Hernandez

Residency period: October-November 2020
Residency realized in collaboration with Derek Van Den Bulcke

Flamenco in the making

Dani Hernández and Derek Van Den Bulcke shared, in our residency program, their research process in which they blur the academic and consensual limits of orthodox flamenco.

Sound and movement establish a dialogue full of questions and abysses, in which with one hand they grasp the legacy of flamenco and with the other they expand its frontiers. Borders that on the other hand have been in constant movement, not only because flamenco is an artistic expression that comes from a wandering community -the gypsy community- but also because as Didi-Huberman says -the morphology of any art form depends on its migrations and its survival in a long-lasting time.

Dani and Derek explore elements such as contradiction, intrinsic in flamenco, -between control and catharsis, ecstasy and stillness, violence and sweetness- breaking melodies and rhythms with movement, dissolving the singing into electronic rhythms, placing an electric guitar instead of the Spanish guitar, or the cement floor instead of the tablao. With their device they immerse us in a polytemporal journey that makes us rethink the essence of the roots and the mystique of the authentic.

If flamenco needs a landscape (even if it is subway, as in the case of the cantes mineros), if it needs to sink its roots in a specific geographical and cultural territory, what happens if it has to live in a time of urbanization and uprooting, as in the case of these artists? Can’t the “duende”, who has disappeared from the streets of the gypsy neighborhoods, fed up with his confinement in the tablaos for tourists and in the academies, get lost in the raves and clubs of any capital city? Could it be that he needs, in his evolution, to incarnate new gestures that incorporate the noise and the loop that are the soundscape of our time?

This research works with both the aesthetic and the political, as it appropriates a culture not as belonging but as a commons to be nourished by one’s own experience, to collectively rewrite its normativity and to shape around it a broader community of our time.