Flash is an international contemporary art/music project whereby visual artists from home and abroad, contemporary composers and musicians are invited to react to each other from within the context of their own disciplines. It is about the development, execution and presentation of nine DVD's.
The world changes, from form to form. According to daughters the beginning of our human existence is the father. Sons think it is the mother. The one begets, the other bares. Whatever our beginnings, the sky (Uranus) once met earth (Gaia). Long before there were gods or people. Maura Biava also issues from this same heritage. In the flash of 'For Urano' she shows how she was initially brought into this world by her father and is, thus, essentially a metamorphosis of him. She embraces her father and seems (through the use of slow motion) to have difficulty freeing herself from him. The music by Roderik de Man creates an atmosphere of panic in which we hear a nervous countdown of seconds: "still thirty seconds", "still twenty seconds". It is as though a disaster is approaching, that Biava is trying to beseech by holding her father in an embrace. In the longer piece Biava tries to perform the impossible. She sings a song under water that nobody can hear, except perhaps the underwater gods. The pull and push of her song emphasizes the unreal protestation of love to her father, while she is already undergoing another unstoppable metamorphosis of herself.
– Kees van Gelder
Since I wanted to combine a vocal piece with the images, I asked Maura Biava to select a poem that fit in with her thoughts on the images. She chose 'A Lyric' by T.S. Eliot, a poem on the transience of life. The dreamy and equivocal atmosphere of the images converge in the simultaneous projection of the English and the Italian versions of Eliot's poem, which are split over the left and right channels. The lyrical character of the poem is expressed in the three arias which make up the work.
– Roderick de Man
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Production: Bifrons Stichting, Amsterdam (Netherlands) & BALTIC, Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead (UK)
Maura Biava ° 1970, Reggio Emilia (Italy)
Lives and works in Rotterdam (Netherlands)
Roderik de Man ° 1941, Bandung (Indonesia)
Lives and works in Amsterdam (Netherlands)
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