The video archive presented on this website is shown as a performance.
This performance-installation is set up on a stage of a theatre (but could be also shown in a gallery or a studio). The audience is invited to enter the stage. The main idea is that the set up of the space suggest a theatrical place, where the place of the audience and the stage of the performance are melt in a single space.
The stage is filled with audience's chairs spread in the whole space. The chairs face different directions. In five of them are monitors showing in certain moments the videos of the archive. During the whole performance the videos are slowly deconstructed, by extracting out of them: sound, image and text.
The duration of the performance-installation is about 50 min. (a common length of a performance).
More than 15 videos are shown each time the work is presented. As the archive grows the content of the performance-installation changes, therefore never the same material is presented.
“Hernández’ installation consisted of a minimal configuration of chairs and monitors in a dance space each showing a different ‘memory’ recording. The looped recordings consisted of sound, textual (subtitled) and visual elements. Over the duration of the work, the elements were removed one by one until only silent visual recordings were running. Emphasizing the physicality of memory, what an act of remembering does to the body, the work both generates its own choreographic intensity and suggests that an archive of dance history resides not (only) in authoritative documents, but, also in the recall of sensation and affect that remains in the bodies of witnesses and participants.”
Ric Allsopp (2010) Future Perfect;"HACER HISTORIA", reflexiones desde la práctica de la danza.