A Siren Call from Faena Art Center
Faena Art presented Osías Yanov’s Choreographies of Salt, the Faena Art Center Buenos Aires’ first individual commission from an Argentine artist. From September 20 to September 22, guests were invited to participate in immersive performances and workshop
Choreographies of Salt was an interactive artwork that revolved around a simulated archaeological discovery of a siren’s skeletal remains found along the banks of Río de la Plata outside the Faena Art Center. The installation extended from the dig site into the Sala Molinos exhibition hall where coarse salt covered the floor and ten performers dressed in chimerical costumes winnowed sinuously among the grains.
Curator Zoe Lukov noted that the siren represented both a mythological fantasy and a current dream for today’s trans community to inhabit a hybrid body. A site of maximum potentiality that insists not on one or the other, but the fertile terrain existing between them. The excavation site also served as a meditation on the space that lies between the dualities of reality and fiction, as well as touching upon the modern narrative of fake news and how the power of collective myth can lead to alternative realities. The artist’s siren drew on ancient myth, Christian theology, and childhood fairytales to conceive a new “body” and gestural language that invited to reimagine the possibilities of our past, present and future.
