Temporary exhibitions

Artist

Beatriz Caravaggio

Dates

14/06/2019 — 06/10/2019

In 1988, the NorthAmerican Steve Reich, one of the leading figures of minimalism, composed a piece about the Jewish Holocaust. Almost thirty years later, this video work by Beatriz Caravaggio confers visual life on the score interpreted by the Kronos Quartet.

The starting point is Different Trains, the work by Steve Reich, one of the essential names in the history of contemporary music of USA, together with composers like John Cage or Philip Glass. The composer recalls the train journeys he himself made between 1939 and 1942 between New York and Los Angeles following the divorce of his parents, and relates it to the train trip to a concentration camp that he would have been forced to make a child of the same age in the Europe of that same period.

Twenty-eight years after the piece was composed, the artist Beatriz Caravaggio was commissioned by the BBVA Foundation to create a videographic work that would put images to music. He did it starting from the recording, considered canonical, that the Kronos Quartet (protagonist of the opening day of 2019 Grec) had done in 1989. On this recording, the author mounted images that show both the beauty of the American landscape as the sombre images of the trains that transported the deportees to the extermination camps or showed the crudest side of the war. A screen divided into three parts allows Caravaggio to create a rich collage of images in the form of a multichannel video that has been considered by Steve Reich himself as a "reflective and exciting" work.

In the context of Grec 2019 Festival de Barcelona