9,189 KM
Exhibition Date: 2023.4.29 – 2023.09.03
Location: 6F
9,189km「Playing between the map and the territory」 is Olga Mesa and Francisco Ruiz de Infante's first institutional show in China. The distance between Olga Mesa and Francisco Ruiz de Infante's home in Auberive, France, and BY ART MATTERS in Hangzhou is 9,189 km. The preparation, which spanned three years, results in an exhibition that can be likened to an "adventure game" that is rich and fluid, much like a symphony. Comprising of seven sections, including three site-specific transversal workshops and a performative conference, the exhibition is a complete visiting experience that is orchestrated through the intersectional audiovisual overlaps within its design. By combining light, shadow, and sound in a dynamic and immersive display, visitors are enveloped in a complete sensory experience that is both captivating and exciting.
The venue on the 6th floor, the multi-functional hall on the 5th floor and the 4 elevator lobbies located at the second lower ground of OōEli are interconnected during the exhibition. In this exhibition, the boundaries between the onstage and offstage are removed, inviting visitors to immerse themselves in the artists' decade-long artistic creations and personal memories. As they navigate through the exhibition, visitors also encounter the collective memory shared by local performers from Hangzhou and images captured over the past three years by two teams working together, despite being over nine thousand kilometres apart. The audience will also find projections of themselves incorporated into different parts of the exhibition. This magnifies the folding and expanding of people’s quotidian lives, evoking a sense of "being lost." As a result, we become more perceptive than ever in experiencing the meaning of "being in the here and now."
Olga Mesa (b. 1962, Spain) is a dancer, choreographer, and visual artist. She is also a significant figure in the generation of contemporary dance that emerged in Spain in the 1990s. Francisco Ruiz de Infante (b. 1966, Spain) is a multi-faceted artist. He is the coordinator of the research group Art Hors-Format at the Haute École des Arts du Rhine (HEAR, Strasburg) since 1999.
Olga and Francisco began collaborating in 2010 and have worked closely in Auberive and Strasbourg (France). In a working relationship spanning over a decade, the duo Ruiz de Infante-Mesa has built bridges between performing, plastic, literary, and audiovisual arts.
