Denise Padron Benitez & Sebastien Durand

31 Dec Denise Padron Benitez & Sebastien Durand

Posted at 15:54h in 2021 eng, Directory eng, Multidisciplinary eng, Visual by

Expanded Spaces Residency Program, curated by Abraham Hurtado
Nea Livera, Greece | November – December 2024
Website

PHERSU is the second chapter of the planned triptych project Exercitia Spiritualia Animae, whose overall aim is to explore the subconscious (dreams), conscious (persona), and the unconscious (shadows) in three freestanding chapters.
It is an experimentation in the navigation of the web, the making and masking of the self in the digital realm. PHERSU took its form as a labyrinth-like website during the art residency  Expanded Spaces.
The work is equal parts a travelogue, a game, an exercise in digital storytelling, and e-poetry. It is a collage and a presentation of research. Most of all: an experiment in self-projection into cyberspace and interactivity between the inner and the outer, the flesh and the screen.

BIO

Denise Maria Padrón Benítez is a multimedia artist and writer currently based in Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Spain. She moves fluidly between different media, working with analog photography, experimental moving image, installation, drawing, ceramics, and poetry.

She holds a double master’s degree in Art History and Cultural Studies from the University of London, with a focus on the theory of photography, moving image, and artistic self-organization. Her first master’s thesis explored the multiple identities of Eleanor Antin, and her subsequent thesis examined artist-organized spaces.

Over the years, she has participated in various art collectives and collaborative projects. Between 2018 and 2022, she made videos as part of the London-based live film and live music collective Loose Association of Cinema and Sound. The group functioned as an improvisational exercise, in which Padrón Benítez created live montages using VDMX in dialogue with sound performances by Patricia Puertas, Xûan Sinden, Bernardo Varela, Lala Padula, Felipe Pitt Campos Peres, Giovana Busato, Manon Schwich, and occasional guest collaborators. Formed around a shared interest in cinema, improvisation, and experimental narrative, the collective provided him with a context in which he deepened his exploration of dreams as a narrative strategy for constructing non-linear, multi-voiced stories.

Sebastien Durand is a visual and sound composer, researcher, and archivist born in France and based in the Canary Islands (Spain). After growing up in North Africa and graduating in graphic arts and computer animation in Montpellier in 2009, he traveled around Europe working on films, and then settled back in Occitania in 2013. He spent the next 10 years co-founding experimental projects related to music and sound: a lo-fi record label, an FM radio station, DIY associations, show organization, as well as design and printing. Since 2022, he has been living in Tenerife, where he collects thoughts, historical notes, and sounds as part of a long-term residency, an archaeosonic research project entitled Cánticos de las piedras olvidadas (Songs of the Forgotten Stones): a cartography of unknown Guanche rituals to revisit the soundscape of the archipelago as a mere reinvention of what was lost after colonization. He also collaborates on the multimedia triptych installation project Exercitia Spiritualia Animae with writer and video artist Denise Padrón Benítez. Durand’s idea is to transform images and sounds to tell stories through analog electronic performance as an attempt to decolonize cultural artifacts.

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